Getting fast RAMs is just as important as buying a good processor or a graphics card.
It is generally understood that faster RAMs provide better performance in gaming and productivity tasks, that is why people do not hesitate to spend the extra money to get faster RAMs when building their computer.
With the release of DDR5 RAM in November last year, we finally entered into a new era of RAM architecture after 2014, when DDR4 RAMs were released.
Now, there are plenty of reviews on the internet that show faster DDR4 RAMs provide significantly better performance than slower DDR4 RAMs.
The difference in performance between a 2400 MHz-bus-speed RAM and a 3200 MHz-bus-speed RAM is huge, especially in gaming performances.
The newly released DDR5 RAMs are even faster than the fastest DDR4 RAMs, with the former offering at least 4800 MHz bus-speed even at the lower end of the spectrum.
So how does this uplift in speed translate into real life? Let us see some benchmark results.
Productivity Tasks:
This is an Adobe premiere pro benchmark tested on the latest Intel 12th generation processor as they are the only batch that currently supports DDR5 RAMs, and we can see that the performance uplift with DDR5 RAMs is not at all noteworthy.
Source: Gamers Nexus
This is a synthetic benchmark of the very popular Cinebench R23 between DDR4 and DDR5 RAMs and we can see that the performance gain with DDR5 RAM is even less than 1.0 per cent, not the sort of result anyone would expect with higher bus speeds.
Similarly, other benchmark results from different productivity tasks also show little to no performance uplift except the 7-zip compression test, but one test can hardly make any sort of statement in this regard.
Gaming performance
The following gaming benchmarks show that in the title ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’, the DDR5 provided a boost of only 3 fps, this sort of gap in fps is generally considered as a margin of error.
In the ‘CS:GO’, there was a boost of 10 fps, this sort of difference in a fast-paced e-sports title like CS:GO is never considered significant.
In the DDR5 RAMs gaming testing, the popular YouTube channel Gamer’s Nexus found no significant performance uplift in any of the games they tested with DDR5 RAMs.
In GTA V, the DDR5 RAM fared even worse than DDR4 RAM. So the faster bus speed on the DDR5 memory doesn’t help in any of the productivity tasks or gaming.
Source: Gamers Nexus
Price
A 16GB DDR5 4800 MHz kit costs at least Tk 12,900, whereas a 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz is priced at around Tk 7,000, so it makes little sense to pay a price premium for DDR5 to experience little to no gain in gaming and productivity performances.
If we factor in the extra cost of acquiring a motherboard that supports DDR5, the proposition of buying a DDR5 memory makes even less sense.
So if anyone is planning to invest in DDR5 RAMs, it is better to invest that money in a better processor or a GPU.
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