- So you've come looking for DDR5?
I'll cut you a deal. Only double retail pricing.
It's a steal, for me, that is.
(man laughing)
- Scalpers have taken the fledgling DDR5 market hostage.
Look around you.
Everything on Neweeg is out of stock right now.
And low end 16 gig modules of DDR5 are being sold
for as much as 32 gigs of Trident Z is supposed to be.
Meanwhile on eBay,
you're looking at anywhere from 700 to $1,000
for a 32 gig kit of the good stuff.
We're in a bad place right now, but there's a light,
a light of justice because the fact that DDR5 is newer,
shinier doesn't mean that you need to buy it.
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(upbeat music)
I know, I know.
We did a whole video about why DDR5 is super cool,
and it really is,
but it's got a lot working against it right now too.
You've got first gen RAM chips interfacing
with first gen memory controllers
over imperfectly optimized first gen trace layouts.
And it's perfectly natural to expect all this first genery
to take a while to reach its full potential.
I mean think about how the first PlayStation 2 games
ended up looking worse than the last PlayStation 1 games
because developers had no idea yet how to unlock
the full potential of the Emotion Engine.
And even in the computer memory space,
this is nothing new.
DDR2, DDR3, DDR4.
If you look at contemporaneous reviews,
you'll find a lot of reports saying
that there is no practical benefit to the upgrade
and that it is certainly not worth the early adopter tax.
Like look at this dork back in 2014,
the synthetic benchmark graphs show DDR4
absolutely wiping the floor with DDR3 in raw bandwidth.
But when we look at the numbers in real-world applications,
even this relatively low spec kit of DDR3,
beats out the fastest DDR4 that was available at the time.
Of course, as we all know, DDR4,
like its predecessors, ended up getting the last laugh
with mid-generation refinements
that led to much higher performance
at ultimately lower costs.
I mean, the hot item back when that video was shot was,
3000 mega transfers per second CL16.
Nowadays, we would call that budget at best,
cheapo at worst.
And the same thing will eventually happen with DDR5,
just not today.
Unlike our new water bottles,
those are already proven superior
and you can get 'em right now,
no scalping required, lttstore.com.
To illustrate our point, we ran a bevy of benchmarks
using our Core I9 12900K paired with an RTX 3090.
This is admittedly a very high spec machine
that not everyone will be using,
but it allows both of our memory technologies
to put their best foot forward
by removing system bottlenecks elsewhere.
For DDR5, we've included both,
the highest currently available JNX speed
and a 5,200 mega transfer per second kit,
which was the fastest that our system could handle reliably.
And then we've included a handful of common
DDR4 configurations.
Kicking things off, our high end DDR5 pulls off
a respectable 5% lead over our fastest DDR4 kit in F1 2021.
Though it should be noted that we're having issues
running more than two sticks of the stuff
at a time right now.
And the other problem is that our lower end DDR5 kit
drops off significantly from its bigger brother.
In fact, while the average FPS drop looks fine,
it trails even our top spec DDR4 by as much as 10%
in minimum frame times.
And that could easily manifest as little hitches
or stutters in your gameplay.
Forza is a little bit kinder to our DDR5,
but the improvement offered by the high end kit
is negligible and the benefit over DDR4 is under 5%
in both cases.
Flight Simulator CPU intensive nature seems like
it should be a good fit for DDR5, but no.
Both kits are actually consistently between one
and 4% slower than our fast DDR4 kit.
That's surprising, but not as surprising as CS:GO
another game that CPU heavy.
While the high-end kit stays roughly equivalent
with a few frames gained or lost, depending on the metric,
our lower end kit is on par or worse than DDR4,
running 400 mega trumps frames per second lower.
Civ VI for its part was more or less the same regardless
with less than half a second separating our DDR5
from our fastest DDR4.
Taken together then the gaming tests average out to
about a 2% win for the high-end kit
and a 2% loss for the low-end kit compared to high end DDR4,
which, and I cannot emphasize this enough costs less
than half as much at retail.
And that is pre scalper markup.
Perhaps productivity will produce
DDR5s proper performance potential.
Cinebench sure doesn't think so.
It's a total wash with a measly 1% difference or less
between our fastest DDR4 and DDR5 kits.
Compiling Firefox though, gives DDR5 its first major win
even the lower end kit picking up a 6% faster time
compared to our best DDR4
and the higher end kit being nearly a minute faster.
Code compilation does hit system memory pretty hard though.
So this isn't a huge surprise,
it's just nice to see a W for it somewhere.
Blender, meanwhile,
doesn't seem to give two hoots what kind of memory you have
as long as it's lots and PugetBench is an interesting case
because every Adobe app tested here,
gets a performance uplift,
but none of them are as stark as Photoshop.
Even our low end DDR5 kit is 14% faster
than our high end DDR4 kit and that's saying a lot.
Though, this again makes sense
because of Photoshop's memory intensive layer
and effects operations, where the GPU isn't really doing
a lot of the work.
Finally, we've got SPECworkstation
where some ridiculously memory intensive tests
come into play giving us substantial 20
and even 30% performance uplifts in the product development,
life sciences and energy suites.
So that stuff like CAD, medical imaging
and geological surveys where there's a lot of data
being thrown around.
Financial services in general operations meanwhile,
not so hot, which we'd expect considering the lighter nature
of that work and our previous results.
Overall then productivity nets us a rather significant,
but kind of inconsistent five to 7% bump in performance,
DDR5 compared to the fastest DDR4.
So this is one area where depending on what you do,
DDR5 might be worth the investment.
Although I gotta say, that better be
some pretty important work you're doing.
To be clear, none of what we're saying is that
DDR5 has no advantages for average gamers.
It's more power efficient for one.
And the nature of it's more numerous,
but smaller burst buffers means that architectures
that rely on responsive memory like Ryzen,
may find more benefit even at these earlier speeds,
despite the looser timings compared to DDR4.
But since a DDR5 Ryzen platform doesn't exist yet,
and by the time it does both motherboard manufacturers
and memory manufacturers might have a better idea
of how to optimize their implementations,
I think it's safe to say that you shouldn't be paying
a premium for it today.
Leading us to the big question we need to answer here,
why are your scalpers scalping it then?
Well, I think there's a big emotional component.
People like having the latest and greatest thing.
And I think that we in the media need to accept
at least part of the blame for that.
But there's another angle to it
and that's motherboard manufacturers.
All of the highest end, shiniest,
most appealing motherboards are DDR5 only.
And now that there's a shortage of it,
it's not just as simple for them as,
plunking down some DDR4 slots in place of the DDR5 ones
to improve consumer options.
Trace layouts and lengths, topology
and of course the fact that the power management IC
is on each DDR5 module rather than built into the board
means that there's a non-trivial amount of work involved
with retooling a board for DDR4.
The good news for you today is that,
most of the highest end motherboards don't really do
a lot to justify the extra spend
at least if you're not overclocking with liquid nitrogen.
As we've seen in our previous motherboard investigation,
down to earth gaming motherboards like,
Asus Rg Strix or MSIs Tomahawk series
are gonna give you performance and features
very close to the bleeding edge.
And if you really must have high-end,
Gigabyte actually has gone to the effort of remaking nearly
their entire lineup in DDR4 flavors,
leaving only the cream of the crop out of reach.
We're gonna have some links to these down below
if you're looking to build a 12th gen rig.
For today, though,
the solution is to hoist a great big middle finger
to scalpers by buying DDR4 while it's still relevant.
Hopefully by the time you don't want it anymore,
the scalpers will have moved on to greener pastures.
Maybe some game console they can buy or something.
Actually, please don't do that.
Game console are one of the only ways people can get a
reasonably priced gaming rig right now.
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Thanks for watching guys,
go check out our previous video on DDR5 for more info
on the inner workings and just how it differs from DDR4.
I promise it is super interesting,
even if you can't or shouldn't buy it right now.