he hey everyone it's me the tech tips
man now that ddr5 has reached insane
speeds of over 10,000 megga transfers
per second we've got to know which sticks should you spend your hard-earned
money on a single kit could cost you anywhere from
$160 to over
$400 so making the right choice can be the difference between wallet pain and
wallet death to help you out we put the screws to 10 kits ranging from stock JX
speeds all the way up to 7,800 megat transfers per second on both
Intel and AMD platforms does it matter a
little does it matter a lot has the lab managed to find the ddr5 price to
Performance Sweet Spot there's only one way to find out lenoe cloud computing
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credit right now Intel has the only platform where we can test both ddr5 and
ddr4 on the exact same CPU so that's
where we started and Intel also had the benefit of being more stable throughout
our testing we'll get into that a little bit more later for now all you need to
know is that we took some of the beefiest hardware commercially available
plugged in some memory kits enabled XMP
and went to town we're going to have all the gear that we used linked down below
if you want to check it out for yourself right out of the gate we can clearly see
that in most games fast ddr4 is still a
valid option but that price to Performance advantage that it enjoyed in
the past seems to have pretty much disappeared this is a 3600 megat
transfer per second kit with pretty tight timings and while it beats our
ddr5 jck kit by anywhere from 1 to 10
FPS on average it does so at a considerably higher price and once we're
spending the same amount on our ddr5 our ddr4 not only loses its Advantage but
falls measurably behind especially in the all important 1% lows the thing is
average frame rates are interesting but the difference between 311 and 3155 FPS
is basically impossible to discern so this bar usually matters a lot more
because a 10 or even 5 FPS difference is
much more likely to be noticeable and it also represents how your system will
perform in the most critical moments when the action is most intense for
gamers then ddr5 is looking like an obvious choice and and more must be
better right not necessarily adding our
7600 and 7800 megat transfer per second
kits to the graphs I mean yeah they performed admirably but just a few more
FPS and sometimes less for a hundred
plus dollars more than our other options what's going on here I mean look at
these numbers in ID to 64 the more we spend the more memory bandwidth we get
so our performance should go up proportionally right well here's the
thing Ida 64's read write and copy
benchmarks are super useful for uncovering system bottlenecks and
diagnostic purposes but they are purely
synthetic that that is to say that they are not representative of any real world
workload other than copying data directly into or out of memory and not
every application is actually hungry for more bandwidth for some applications
latency is actually much more important and that's where our ddr4 kit shines
with only the fastest ddr5 kits closing the Gap most of the ddr5 kits that we
tested today hit first word latency figures of 10 NS or faster but our ddr4
kit managed less than 8 NCS you can
roughly calculate these values for your own kit by the way just take your
module's cast latency or how long it takes to complete a clock cycle then
multiply it by 2,000 and divide by the transfer speed the lower the first word
latency generally the snappier your memory will be but as evidenced by the
performance improvements we see with our faster kits it is both this latency and
transfer speeds that are crucial when it comes to getting the most out of your
system's memory for applications and gains today look at these two 6,000
megat transfer per second kits there's a pretty Stark difference in cast timings
here resulting in a 3.3 nond difference in latency the faster one is a little
over $20 more for about a 1 to 5 FPS
Improvement but if we bump up the speed to this 6400 kit with timings that keep
us at 10 NCS we get more performance but
start to hit our point of diminishing value returns and then anything past
this point sees such a stark drop in performance Improvement that it doesn't
really warrant spending tens or hundreds of extra dollars to try to make the line
go up at least at current pricing but what about AMD well for team red our
biggest hurdle was just getting kits faster than 6,400 megat transfers per
second to even run long story short they
didn't and that's likely to change anytime soon our testing started mid
last month so that's December of 2022 and we were running on a GSA version
1.0.0 do3 patch d right before we filmed
this Gigabyte dropped a new BIOS for our motherboard that included an update to
1.0.4 supposedly improving memory support and it does but the difference
wasn't enough to boot any of our previously incompatible kits I'm certain
that professional overclockers will be able to use this extra heav room to push
the platform to new heights but our goal was to measure the outof Box experience
so we didn't do any tuning Beyond plugging in the CPU plugging in the RAM
and enabling XMP or Expo as it were the
good news is that even though it relatively slow our 6400 memory
absolutely slayed on AMD going from a
basic ddr5 kit to a premium but still not outlandishly priced kit saw almost
every game gain 10% average FPS or more
this is especially notable because these are similar gains to what we saw in
Intel but we aren't spending as much on our top performing memory since we
topped out at a lower speed and it's safe to assume that if future BIOS
updates can get the jello to stop shaking AMD's performance should only
improve as we get stable access to significantly faster memory
right well not exactly we are still
hitting the point of diminishing returns here especially when you consider to the
price AMD's chips really like tighter
timings and that seems to be the biggest Factor when it comes to games I mean
sure the JX spec 4800 cl40 kit is way
slower than our top end but look at this 5600 cl28 result it's on par or just
behind its more expensive counterpart and for about $20 less and the reason
lies here while the transfer speed might be higher on that 6400 kit it actually
has the same first word latency as the 5600 configuration I mean if you were to
take that faster kit and sit around for hours tuning the timings chances are
that you would end up with a better result during our quick sanity check
with the latest BIOS we found that a jisa 1.0.4 does improve stability at 6,400
with manually tightened timings but the reality is that many of you don't even
overclock your CPU these days let alone your memory and realistically your time
is probably better spent buying our new underwear from LTT Store.com we've got
new colors available check them out today at least that's true for gaming
for productivity where we'll have a lot more CPU cores to feed with delicious
data it's a whole different Beast similar to what we saw with Intel faster
modules seem to make a huge difference in some workloads and then basically
none in others handbrake for example sees an impressive boost of
22% over jde wow but then just about
everything else see either no improvement a clearly linear progression
that is so small you might as well save your money or what could best be
described as run to run variants one major issue to note is that we have more
productivity results but our 6400 kit didn't manage to finish all of them so
hence the did not finish results we do expect this to continue to improve over
time as am5 matures as a platform and new BIOS updates roll out but it was a
major problem for us at the time of testing and the improvements that were
available by the time we're actually filming it have been pretty marginal so
nobody knows exactly what the future will hold and it's still not 100% clear
where the ddr5 bang for your buck sweet spot is going to ultimately end up I
mean considering that ddr4 launched in 2014 and higher speed kits took years to
become the norm it's still early days for this new generation but what is
clear is that you don't want to buy something with significantly slower
firstword latency if you can avoid it particularly on the lower transfer speed
modules oh and also that there is no
point buying faster than 6,000 or at most 6400 speed memory for AMD at least
for this generation if you enjoyed this video we haven't tried it with ddr5 yet
but you might want to check out our just how bad is mixing memory video it's not
as bad as you might think or at least wasn't