this is the 8 gig stick i ordered the 16 Gigabyte kit
the chef insists sir your chef is a fool
because some game developers are even recommending 32 gigabytes told you this
was the kind of place you leave hungry
unless eight gigabytes is enough
to find out crucial sponsored this video where we're
going to be testing 8 and 16 Gigabyte kits in both ddr4 and ddr5 flavors to
ensure that you are not wasting your money
for gamers system memory or RAM plays a crucial role see what i did there
its main job is to ensure that your CPU and for gamers using onboard graphics
your GPU get the high speed access to
assets that are required to run your game smoothly because the second you
have to swap files out to an SSD or even worse a hard drive you're likely to
encounter problems ranging from FPS drops to slower loading times to random
hitching or stuttering but once you have enough RAM to eliminate
these problems there's often no performance benefit to adding more
meaning it is really easy to blow away money that could have been spent on a
better CPU better GPU or even a faster
rather than higher capacity RAM kit to isolate memory as our performance
variable then we chose a top tier test bench with a core i9 CPU and an rtx
3080ti we also tested each game at both
1080p and 4k to see if our RAM would affect performance more or less
depending on whether we're CPU or GPU bottlenecked as for our memory we tested
eight gigs of ddr4 in both single and dual channel configurations and 16 gigs
in dual channel and crucial also asked us to throw in their new ddr5 sticks
with the black pcb that's right no unicorn vomit lighting effects on these
boys but they're pretty sharp looking in an understated kind of way and according
to crucial's internal testing they don't need heat spreaders so it turns out some
of the concerns about ddr5's on dim power management requiring extra cooling
don't apply to at least jdx spec modules
anyway whether you like RGB or blacked out builds at the end of the day it's
performance that counts so let's kick things off with csgo at 1080p it's our
tried and true CPU limited game and you'll be happy to know that yes 10
years later it will still run perfectly fine with only 8 gigs of RAM however the
advantage of going dual channel is huge at this resolution with our single 8 gig
stick of ddr4 performing terribly by comparison
this advantage mostly disappeared however once we scaled up to 4k and
adding more memory hardly made a difference at either resolution which
makes sense given the developer calls for only two gigabytes of system memory
curiously while our ddr5 numbers are a little lower than ddr4 we don't see the
same massive drop in performance for dropping from dual to single channel
what ah that's because ddr5 is already dual
channel or sort of instead of using a single 72-bit bus on
a dim like ddr4 with 64 bits for data
and 8 for ecc or error correction code each ddr5 module gets two 40-bit buses
again with eight bits on each going towards ecc
so you still get the same total 64-bit data width but with each half of it
operating semi-independently now some workloads like running complex
simulations may still need at least two sticks for peak performance but for
bandwidth light applications like games well the results kind of speak for
themselves csgo is old though let's turn to far cry
6 which launched late last year with a minimum requirement of 8 gigs of RAM
specifically dual channel and a recommendation of 16 gigs
unsurprisingly eight gigs in dual channel did perform markedly better than
a single channel stick at 1080p but curiously this uptick applied only to
average frame rates the far more important one percent lows were nearly
identical between the two at either resolution doubling our memory to a 16
gig kit however saw our lows skyrocket
improving over 40 percent at full hd
we saw improvements at 4k resolution as well with a 16 gig kit bringing our lows
from 47 FPS to 61 on ddr4 these are the
kinds of performance differences that you will feel while gaming
Floatplane.com by the way has a great behind the scenes of alex feeling pretty
upset about spilling water on a system and trying to fix it you can check it
out at the link down below moving up a generation our single stick
of ddr5 marginally outperforms our single stick of ddr4 at 1080p but then
does slightly worse at 4k however when we add a second eight gig
ddr5 module we see this same trend of
increased capacity leading to better performance at both resolutions lifting
our one percent lows by 25 percent in 1080p and 33 at 4k getting us really
close to that magic 60fps number where most people consider animation to be
very smooth remember though guys just because a game
runs at an average of 60 frames per second that doesn't mean you're not
going to notice hitching when you're hitting those one percent lows of 30 or
40 FPS so for the smoothest experience possible you want your lows at 60 or
even higher tiny tina's wonderland saw similar if
lower results at 1080p with our poor sad
single stick of ddr4 underperforming by about 18
compared to our dual channel configuration and here again increasing
capacity doesn't really net us improvements to our average FPS but it
does impact our one percent lows though
only by about five percent this time it's up to you to decide if a five
percent gain is worth doubling up your RAM budget when we scale up to 4k though
all three configurations of ddr4 saw nearly identical results since our CPU
usage dropped and our GPU became the limiting factor
what's interesting about wonderlands however is that we actually saw the best
results with ddr5 in 1080p our single stick of ddr5 beat
our single stick of ddr4 by 11 and doubling up improved it even more
at 4k the story is pretty similar with our single channel ddr4 being the worst
adding capacity beyond 8gig not really seeming to help and ddr5 being the
absolute king for performance in this game but why though
well wonderlands is the newest game we tested so
it could be that newer games coming out over the next few years are going to be
designed targeting current gen consoles which have
much faster memory than the playstation 4 and xbox one x generation
these newer games may be able to better take advantage of what ddr5 has to offer
and crucial would like us to point out that with up to 87 more bandwidth than
ddr4 at launch performance is enhanced not just during testing but in real
world conditions and with support for xmp 3.0 we can expect to see even more
performance out of crucials ddr5 on future platforms like AMD's upcoming am5
and Intel's 13th gen core thanks again crucial for sponsoring this video
and for understanding that our audience needs the whole picture which might
include situations where your product won't have much of an impact
total warhammer 3 saw almost identical
performance across the board at 4k regardless of single dual channel
capacity and even the generation of memory then at 1080p improvements to our
hardware yielded only minimal performance uplifts meaning that if you
only play tw3 you could just pick up a wan hoodie from ltdstore.com instead
check them out at the link below because we've got lots in stock finally
back to our results assassin's creed valhalla saw clear improvements going
from single to dual channel as expected but increasing capacity only seemed to
help ddr5 and not by much regardless of
resolution now unfortunately because every game is
developed so differently even if you're looking at two titles that use the same
engine it's hard to say whether or not upgrading your memory capacity will
improve your gaming experience we've known for years that dual channel at the
bare minimum is the way to go and that's still crystal clear here but unless
you're playing newer games that actually take advantage of more memory you're
probably better off buying a faster dual channel configuration and dumping any
extra you have left over into your CPU GPU combo now to be clear there are
games out there now that will utilize more than 8 gigs of RAM but if you're
not playing the newest aaa titles it may not be worth the upgrade for you
yet if you want to be ready though we're gonna have all the products we use today
linked in the video description below thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed
this video make sure to check out some of our other RAM videos like that time
we tested mixed memory modules with mixed results