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
scalpers have taken the fledgling ddr5 market hostage look around you
everything on newegg 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 a
thousand dollars 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 and shinier doesn't mean
that you need to buy it unlike our sponsor glasswire lets you
see past and present network activity detect malware on your pc or Android
device and block its connections to prevent things from getting worse use
offer code Linus to get 25 off at the link down below
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 january 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
and 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 3
000 mega transfers per second cl 16.
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 them right now no scalping required ltdstore.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 jdx
speed and a 5200 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 percent 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's CPU
intensive nature seems like it should be a good fit for ddr5
but no both kits are actually consistently between one and four
percent slower than our fast ddr4 kit
that's surprising but not as surprising as cs go another game that's 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 transfers per second lower
save 6 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 percent win for
the high-end kit and a two percent 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 ddr5's proper performance potential cinebench
sure doesn't think so it's a total wash with a measly one percent difference or
less between our fastest ddr4 and ddr5
kits compiling firefox though gives ddr5 its
first major win with even the lower end kit picking up a six percent 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
puget bench is an interesting case because every adobe app tested here gets
the performance uplift but none of them are as dark 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 spec workstation 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's stuff like cad medical imaging and geological surveys
where there's a lot of data being thrown around
financial services and 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 has a rather significant but
kind of inconsistent five to seven percent bump in performance with 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 its more numerous but
smaller burst buffers means that architectures that rely on responsive
memory like ryzen may find more benefit even at these early 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 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 and 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
plonking 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 is 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 MSI's tomahawk series are going to
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 consoles are one of the only ways people can get a like reasonably priced gaming
rig right now thanks brilliant for sponsoring today's
video brilliant teaches you by solving puzzles and problems on their website
and app they've got over 60 interactive courses in math science and computer
science and brilliant is just a great website to help you achieve your goals
in stem their courses are designed to puzzle and surprise you and one that
probably all of you will like is mathematical fundamentals is it possible
to drag the number tiles so that every row and column adds up to the target sum
beside it find out by giving it a try today just go to brilliant.org Linus
tech tips to find out the first 200 of you to click on the link will get 20 off
today 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 at least shouldn't buy it right now