It's the kind of kit that will have a long life, too. In a few years from now, 64GB will still be more than useful, especially if you're talking about a high-end gaming PC. Kingston's Fury Beast kit eschews flashy RGB and huge heat sinks in favour of a design that's subtle and discrete. If your PC is sitting under a desk, out of sight and mind, do you really need a lot of bling? Since the JEDEC DDR4-3200 standard is a BIOS option for the DDR4-supporting Z690 Extreme WiFi 6E, we selected it to form our performance baseline in the tests that follow. Apart from that, a custom-configured DDR4-3200 14-16-16-30 setting fills the gap between it and Mushkin’s DDR4-3600 CAS 16 XMP setting. Bandwidth and Latency Tests It's a perfect set and forget kit. At just 1.1V, it runs cool. It's a great pairing for a B660 build and its low height means it's a lot easier to use with large air coolers compared to many kits on the market. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority.

In contrast, the 7-Zip Beta compression/decompression benchmark shows tremendous gains in file-compression performance with the DDR5 kit. (See the 7-Zip results on their own tab.) So, in addition to the built-in 7-Zip benchmark, we added an actual 7.6GB file-compression time (a second 7-Zip result) to our timed benchmarks. With Intel's "Alder Lake" 12th Generation desktop processors, we have the debut of a new memory standard in consumer PCs: DDR5, which is used by many of the motherboards that support the new chips. One thing we know about DDR5 is that it’s "faster" than DDR4 by the most commonly marketed numbers, but those numbers are just a measure of theoretical peak data rate. (For a primer on the essentials of DDR5, see What Is DDR5? Everything You Need to Know About the Latest PC Memory Standard.) Intel's Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) extension evolves alongside DDR4, so now we have the third iteration of XMP. So, what has changed with XMP 3.0? Well, there are now up to five XMP profiles, and users can modify and save two custom XMP profiles directly onto the SPD. Memory experts and system architects know that the latency matters only at the system level since that is what users typically experience. That said, system latency is also measured in nanoseconds and is a combination of host memory controller features and behavior, number of module ranks, memory speed, and true memory latency. You’re probably thinking something along the lines of “16GB is plenty for most stuff, right?” And you’re right…mostly. It’s true that most basic computing tasks—navigating the desktop, managing files, etc—don’t take up much RAM, but that isn’t true for other applications you’d consider to be relatively basic.On the other hand, having 32GB of RAM will help boost your productivity if you’re working in heavy-duty professional graphic or audio design applications, and that alone may be worth the price of admission. Gaming with only 8GB of RAM in your system can be a dicey proposition. Yes, there are many games — including modern titles — that run perfectly fine with 8GB of memory. But if you want to play something demanding like The Division 2, which requires 11.3GB of RAM, 8GB simply won’t cut it. You’re better off streaming games from services like GeForce Now or Xbox Game Pass on PC if you only have 8GB of RAM. How much RAM most people need: 16GB

Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. Unlike the last transition from DDR3 to DDR4, DDR5 doesn't have more pins than its predecessor. Instead, DDR5 retains the arrangement with 288 pins, but the pinouts are different. As a result, the position of the notch has changed and will help prevent less-experienced users from trying to insert a DDR5 memory module into a DDR4 slot, or vice versa. That's only a small change, though. The real game-changer resides at an architectural level that you don't see on the outside of the DIMM. Let’s calculate the true memory latencies of DDR4-3200 CL22 and DDR5-4800 CL40 as an exercise. Extended memory timings are usually ignored when calculating true memory latencies and system latencies. Here is the formula we’ll use for true memory latency:With PCIe 5.0 being widely adopted by computing components such as graphics cards and SSDs, having DDR5 RAM means your PC can make better use of the added bandwidth available. This means that, ultimately, some of the best PC games will run smoother and at higher FPS as a result. Is single or dual-channel DDR5 RAM better? What that tells us: The answer to the question "Which is better, DDR5 or DDR4?" really comes down to which tests you include (or don't include). But whatever your selector set is, the results remain close, at least with today's modules.