It seems this RAM crisis just won't stop. Earlier today, a customer's wallet was brutalized
at the local computer's RS. Live at the scene is special correspondent Riley Murdock.
Thank you Linus. The scene here is chaos. There is affected customers everywhere. Excuse
me, excuse me sir. I see you're holding a high speed DDR5 kit there. Can you explain
why you paid extra for that instead of a lower speed kit?
I don't know man. Everybody tells me I need the more expensive stuff, but it's just so
expensive. I'm just happy they didn't take my other kidney.
Should we tell them? Are you a gamer, sir?
Yes. Then we've got some fantastic news for you because we tested 4 CPUs at 8 different speeds
of DDR5, running as slow as 4800 megatransfers per second, and it turns out you might not
need to spend as much on memory as you thought.
Ooh, that does not look great. Good thing he was born with two of them. But hey, it's
not all bad. Let me cheer you up with this segue to our sponsor. Can we get this guy
some help? The TLDR of our extensive testing is that while some CPUs do obviously benefit from
faster memory, AMD's recent statement that their popular X3D gaming CPUs are super down
to shack up with even the slowest memory seems to be pretty much accurate. We found that
at typical gaming resolutions and settings, there was almost no difference between kits
that run at industry standard or Jdex speeds and faster overclocked gaming RAM. Now, this
is not going to completely solve the problem. Even slower memory has been impacted by recent
price increases. But hey, at least it gives us some options. Let's find out then how
much performance we might be giving up, starting with Intel, where unfortunately the story
is not quite as rosy as AMD's X3D chips. We chose both a last gen and a current gen
representative and we used our standard Labs test matches. Testing took forever by the
way because we had to use the same memory kit across each platform, which meant swapping
out a lot of RAM. Let's start with gaming on Raptor Lake.
Being strictly at our geomean across all games at 1080p, it's pretty clear that our
14900K loves fast DDR5. So if your grandma made a strategic DDR5 investment last year
and you can get some 8400 megatransfer per second CL40, to the moon it goes! At least
in certain games, like Ashes of the Benchmark, Cyberpunk, and Red Dead Redemption 2. The
good news is though, as long as you don't pair it with the slowest kit you can find,
it won't suffer too much. As for Intel's newer Core Ultra 285K, good news! It couldn't
even run our fastest kit. And as for the rest, as long as you're using something that's
faster than JDEC, basically don't worry about it. When we look at the all-important 1%
lows, there is at most a handful of FPS difference across every game and resolution that we tested
to the point where I would say that unless you have an FPS counter in the corner, you
would never know the difference. And this is especially true as your resolution and
your in-game details scale up. Now, you're probably wondering at this point, if these
differences are so small, why were all of you reviewers acting like REM speed mattered
before? It's all about the context, guys. When we were talking about 20 or 30 bucks
to get a few percent performance improvement on your 1500 or 2000 dollar gaming PC, that's
a no-brainer. Who doesn't want bang for the buck? But we're not talking 20 or 30
bucks. We're talking 200 or $300 for a higher speed kit. That changes the math completely.
Or does it? Maybe productivity will tell a different story. Okay, not in Blender. But
our Godot compile test does see a decent improvement with higher speed memory on the 4900K. And
that's not a completely isolated case. While many of our productivity tests do mirror our
gaming tests across both Intel's current and last gen chips, there are a significant
number of results here where spending far more on your memory can yield a meaningful
difference in performance to the point where, if you're making money with your machine,
you might want to consider ponying up for a high speed low latency kit, even at today's
extortionate pricing, which is exactly the problem that consumers are facing right now.
You want to play video games and you gotta budget accordingly. Well, Joe Workstation user,
he's not playing games. He wants to compile his code faster. So he submits a requisition
to the IT department who goes, yeah, if it'll make you more productive, go for it. We're
gonna have a companion LTTLabs.com article, by the way, that dives a little deeper into
which business use cases might benefit and which ones won't. On the subject of business,
check out the new sand colored tech pants at LTTstore.com. They offer loads of utility
with hidden pockets galore while keeping stylish on the job. Now let's change gears
and talk a little bit about AMD. Don't you guys love it when twice a day the corporate
puffery clock gets it right? Just look at those beautifully aligned graphs on our 9800X3D.
Okay, there is a little bit of variance. Our 4800 megatransfer per second kit does sit
in last place and 6000 megatransfer CL30 is still the sweet spot, but turn on ray tracing
or up the resolution and things become even more samelier than before. Like on Intel,
Cyberpunk and Ashes show the biggest spread in our 1080p results, but it's a much smaller
gap and realistically, there are cases here where using 16 gig versus 24 gig modules is
going to make as much of a difference or more. 3DV cash for the win. As for the regular
cash, it might be for the win too. It turns out that while our 9950X did stumble a little
bit with our slowest JDEC kit, overall, as long as you can get your hands on something,
anything with a tuned expo profile, you probably won't notice a difference, especially at risk
of sounding like a broken record, at risk of sounding like a broken record, especially if you
turn up your in-game details or kick your resolution up to 4k. Moving on to productivity,
we've got a similar story to what we saw on Intel, just through a different colored lens.
The JDEC kit is definitely the slowest, demonstrating that overclocked memory does
have a reason to exist, just not at the current prices. Beyond that, there were occasional cases
where faster memory or especially sweet spot memory that runs in sync with AMD's Infinity
Fabric at nice low latencies did result in measurable gains, but outside of those specific
use cases, like Godot, the differences are not going to be enough to ruin your day.
So in conclusion, don't be this guy. If you're a gamer and high-speed memory is available for a
modest price delta, it can make a lot of sense, especially if you're on an older Intel platform.
But right now, I just can't recommend it, especially to the tens of thousands of you
that are buying X3D processors for gaming. By the way, we're going to have X3D processors and
all the stuff that we used on our benches linked in the video description if you guys wanted to
check something out for your next rig, just don't expect any great deals on the RAM down there.
As for the non-gaming folks, man, I really feel for the cottage industry professionals right now,
the folks who do work at home that requires faster RAM or especially a lot of RAM. Like,
it's hard to care too much about corporate's workstation budget, but if you're an at-home
developer or you're a contract creative professional, it is a super sucky time to need an upgrade.
The only good news I have for you is that you can shave a few bucks off of your budget for now,
and then with the money you saved, hopefully get something a little faster once the bubble pops.
Any time now would be nice!
All right, well, I guess it's not happening yet, but while we continue to wait, here's a word
from our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to check out the last time we did this,
but with DDR4. So if you want to pick up like an older Intel 12 or 13th gen chip and pair that
with some nice fancy DDR4, you can decide for yourself exactly how much to spend.