News DDR5 vs DDR4: Is It Time To Upgrade Your RAM?

[Admin]

We compare DDR5 to the best DDR4 RAM on the market to see whether it's worth the cost of upgrading.

DDR5 vs DDR4: Is It Time To Upgrade Your RAM? : Read more

 

[InvalidError]

There is no point in using DDR5 for "futureproofing" when you are going to ditch your overpriced DDR5 anyway because today's DDR5 will be considered garbage by contemporary standards in 2-3 years.

Get DDR4 today, set the money aside for your next CPU-MoBo-RAM upgrade a few years down the road where 32GB DDR5 6400-34 will be $150 value RAM.

 

[VforV]

There is no point in using DDR5 for "futureproofing" when you are going to ditch your overpriced DDR5 anyway because today's DDR5 will be considered garbage by contemporary standards in 2-3 years.

Get DDR4 today, set the money aside for your next CPU-MoBo-RAM upgrade a few years down the road where 32GB DDR5 6400-34 will be $150 value RAM.

Exactly, there is almost zero "futureproofing", because of all of the above.

The only reason to get DDR5 today is because you don't care about how much it costs and "need to have" the best and newest, otherwise no one should buy it (if you can find it in stock, that is)... no one.

If you buy 12900k and RTX 3090 and other halo/premium stuff then you don't care about price at all, so of course you buy DDR5, preferably 6000 or higher, because 4800 is really bad, actually. But those people are in the minority 5%, everyone else can skip it with ease and peace of mind, because it's not worth it.

HUB in the latest video has this exact test and the same conclusion testing 41 games (nutz !).
He does have some examples of +20%-ish more performance for DDR5 6000 (at 1080p), in a few games, but there are other games with regression too (where DDR4 wins), which this article does not show... and that's important.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omumzW1AtGE

 

[Endymio]

Multiple gross errors in this article:

"On-die ECC doesn't offer any protection for data in transit, which is why on-die ECC isn't a true ECC implementation....One can question on-die ECC's utility since errors are more prominent when the data travels over the memory bus. Furthermore, on-die ECC requires extra capacity to store parity, representing another added cost to DDR5..."

1. DDR5's on-die ECC is complemented by link ECC, which does cover transmission errors.
2. Full ECC implementations require stored parity, for both DDR4 and DDR5, and thus additional capacity.
3. The majority of single-bit soft errors are believed to originate from SEE events within the DDR itself, not the bus.

 

[spongiemaster]

There is no point in using DDR5 for "futureproofing" when you are going to ditch your overpriced DDR5 anyway because today's DDR5 will be considered garbage by contemporary standards in 2-3 years.

Get DDR4 today, set the money aside for your next CPU-MoBo-RAM upgrade a few years down the road where 32GB DDR5 6400-34 will be $150 value RAM.

Most users don't upgrade every 2 or 3 years. If you're building a high end system (not 12600k or lower) and planning on keeping your system for 5 years, might as well go with DDR5 if you can afford it. The couple hundred dollars you save now isn't going to buy you a new high end system in 3 years. Everything has gotten insanely expensive. You bought a $500+ CPU, $1000+ GPU, $400+ motherboard, what's a couple extra 100 dollars for your RAM at that point? If you're building a budget system, DD4 is the obvious choice.

 

[Endymio]

Most users don't upgrade every 2 or 3 years. If you're building a high end system [and] planning on keeping your system for 5 years

No power user waits anywhere near five years to upgrade their system, and those considering a DDR5 upgrade now certainly fall into that category.

 

[spongiemaster]

No power user waits anywhere near five years to upgrade their system, and those considering a DDR5 upgrade now certainly fall into that category.

Depends on your definition of power user. If you define it as someone who only buys top of the line, then I already addressed that in my original post.

 

[USAFRet]

No power user waits anywhere near five years to upgrade their system, and those considering a DDR5 upgrade now certainly fall into that category.

The "power user" sitting in my chair right now would beg to differ.

 

[InvalidError]

Most users don't upgrade every 2 or 3 years. If you're building a high end system (not 12600k or lower) and planning on keeping your system for 5 years, might as well go with DDR5 if you can afford it.

No matter how much you "can afford it", it is still wasted money if it provides near-zero benefits in most of your everyday uses.

While some people like being early adopters for "futureproofing", I do the exact opposite: I upgrade at the end of a major market cycle (DDR4 in this case) to get the most mature version of stuff possible for long-term stability and reliability at a relatively low cost.

 

[Endymio]

The "power user" sitting in my chair right now would beg to differ.

Given your signature block indicates you're still using not DDR4, but DDR3, are you truly certainly you're classed in the same category as power-users considering the bleeding-edge upgrade to DDR5? Who else but them would this article be aimed at?

 

[InvalidError]

Given your signature block indicates you're still using not DDR4, but DDR3, are you truly certainly you're classed in the same category as power-users considering the bleeding-edge upgrade to DDR5? Who else but them would this article be aimed at?

What is a "power user"? There are plenty of engineers and scientists working on relatively crappy PCs because the projects they are working on require such massive scale compute that all of the real work gets delegated to server farms and supercomputers, so they only need their PCs to edit scripts and read results.

You don't have to personally be at the bleeding edge of tech to be a power-user. In one place I worked as an ASiC validation specialist, the team lead had the crappiest PC in the department which he could easily make up for with his mad unix/screens skills - you don't need a powerful PC on your own desk when you can just remote into everyone else's to run your scripts.

 

[USAFRet]

Given your signature block indicates you're still using not DDR4, but DDR3, are you truly certainly you're classed in the same category as power-users considering the bleeding-edge upgrade to DDR5? Who else but them would this article be aimed at?

What is your definition of "power user"?
CAD for my personal projects, 2-3000 photos annually, video editing, software dev to satisfy a user community of 150k...
My storage space at home is a 65TB NAS, and that at work is much larger.

Just now, I'm in the process of moving my main home system from the i7-4790k to a Ryzen 5 5600X.

I neither need nor want bleeding edge. I want what works. When it becomes 'too slow' (like now), then upgrade.
I would not be buying into a DDR5 platform today. After DDR5 performance significantly outpaces DDR4 at a reasonable cost, then maybe we'll see.

 

[spongiemaster]

No matter how much you "can afford it", it is still wasted money if it provides near-zero benefits in most of your everyday uses.

You're looking at as an absolute cost addition instead of total build cost percentage increase. Adding 5-10% more to your total build cost to get up to 20% performance increase in some situations is not blanketly a waste of money. The other issue is motherboard selection. If the motherboard you want is DDR5 based, that's what you're going with.

 

[USAFRet]

The other issue is motherboard selection. If the motherboard you want is DDR5 based, that's what you're going with.

Exactly.
You don't change just to get the new level of DDR.

You change the motherboard and CPU for the performance boost, and "Oh, this requires DDR5."

 

[InvalidError]

You're looking at as an absolute cost addition instead of total build cost percentage increase. Adding 5-10% more to your total build cost to get up to 20% performance increase in some situations is not blanketly a waste of money.

Fast enough DDR5 to ensure you get no performance regressions vs DDR4 adds closer to 20% to total build cost assuming you are able to get it at MSRP in the first place, more if you need it now and have to pay scalper prices to get it since most DDR5 isn't in stock through normal channels.

 

[Endymio]

What is a "power user"? There are plenty of engineers and scientists working on relatively crappy PCs because the projects they are working on require such massive scale compute that all of the real work gets delegated to server farms and supercomputers, so they only need their PCs to edit scripts and read results. You don't have to personally be at the bleeding edge of tech to be a power-user....

All valid points, and all irrelevant to the issue at hand. An article evaluating a potential upgrade to that "bleeding edge of tech" is obviously oriented only to those individuals inclined to seek it.

 

[InvalidError]

All valid points, and all irrelevant to the issue at hand. An article evaluating a potential upgrade to that "bleeding edge of tech" is obviously oriented only to those individuals inclined to seek it.

If you throw out 7zip and Y-cruncher, the only two "productivity" categories where DDR5 clearly outperforms DDR4, there is near-zero benefit to DDR5 in this story's results and the conclusion that should be drawn from it is that first-gen DDR5 is not worth bothering with.

 

[Endymio]

...the conclusion that should be drawn from it is that first-gen DDR5 is not worth bothering with.

Again, you're moving the goalposts with a potentially valid, but irrelevant point. The post to which I originally replied suggested that DDR5 should be purchased for no other reason than 'most users' only upgrade every 5 years. I was doing no more than pointing out the fallacy therein.

As for actual conclusions to be drawn, the article's factual errors don't bode well for its results, and indeed a cursory look indicates at least two potential methodology issues. But taking the results as wholly accurate, DDR5 certainly appears contraindicated for gamers. However Adobe Lightroom showed a 40% performance increase over the fastest JEDEC-certified DDR4, and a 28% increase over the fastest overclocked DDR4; far more than necessary to justify the price differential. The actual takeaway here appears to be to judge your situation on a case-by-case basis, depending on intended usage.

 

[VforV]

In this 41 games test, depending on what games you play you can see up +20% more performance or -13% less performance with DDR5, so it's really a gamble because even with newer games we don't know yet if you will get better or worse or the same performance as DDR4.

I think DDR5 for now is more like a whim for tech snobs.

(click on the image too see a higher res version)

 

[Endymio]

In this 41 games test ...[snip] ... I think DDR5 for now is more like a whim for tech snobs.

Computers are used for more than gaming. It's long been known that most games are as sensitive to memory latency as they are overall bandwidth. Other workloads may or may not be.

 

[Wrss]

Kind of stopped taking the comparison seriously when they purposely went with single-rank DDR4 to make it "fair" with the single-rank DDR5. Not market reality. The % differences they're showing are often less than the 3-5% difference found between 2-rank and 4-rank application benchmarks.

 

[-Fran-]

People that uses their computers for work are indeed power users, but "of the business category", not "hobbists". Unless your business depends on time-to-produce (or time to market, generally speaking), then you won't upgrade ever year, 2 or even 3. There's also the side of "stability", which is often the un-said side of the business, which in this case, is also something important most "business" people do consider, but "hobbists" do not. What is the proportion of both? Moot point, as neither (even combined) would make a dent in Intel's accounting sheet. True business people goes for workstations and proper certified drivers for their systems and they're not being reflected here as they're still in the DDR4 (true ECC, in particular) market.

This is simple: no desktop user; enthusiast, gamer or hobbist, really needs DDR5 right now. Period. This is good for consumers as it means they can save money over the stupidly priced modules and kind of bad for Intel as it makes one feature of their new platform, well, kind of useless right now.

EDIT:

Kind of stopped taking the comparison seriously when they purposely went with single-rank DDR4 to make it "fair" with the single-rank DDR5. Not market reality. The % differences they're showing are often less than the 3-5% difference found between 2-rank and 4-rank application benchmarks.

Oh, I didn't notice that. Good spot. That being said, I don't know how rank duality or x8/x16 banks affect Intel performance though. Still a good point to bring up, but I don't think it'll change things over the conclusion much: DDR5 is pointless for most cases and scenarios.

Regards.

 

[JOSHSKORN]

I jumped on DDR4 with my Rampage V Extreme. Spent a ton of money for it. This was 2014. Since then, I've actually replaced that initial RAM kit with a 64GB kit at less than half of the price of my initial 16GB kit. This was last year. My PC, aside from lacking Windows 11 TPM 2.0 requirements, works just fine. I see no benefit to upgrading to DDR5. The jump from DDR3 to DDR4 was actually noticeable. I have a feeling that there will be little to no benefit upgrading from DDR4, even after the generations following DDR5. With shortages still looming, I'm definitely not interested, and I hear this may go on until 2024, but lets hope it's not that far away.

 

[alincioaba]

We compare DDR5 to the best DDR4 RAM on the market to see whether it's worth the cost of upgrading.

DDR5 vs DDR4: Is It Time To Upgrade Your RAM? : Read more

Isn't it a bit misleading? Is it time to upgrade you ram?! More like is it time to upgrade you platform. I'm not an idiot, i know that i can't pair my 8700k with ddr5 but some regular bloke who buys from Walmart will buy a shiny new ddr5 kit and spend a fortune

 

[King_V]

For personal use, I'm chugging along on a tiny Athlon 200GE box, and an older PC using DDR3 and a Haswell CPU as my "main" gaming rig.

Ironically, I've not been doing a whole lot of gaming, some light retrogaming and other stuff that doesn't require much power, so my Athlon is actually getting used a lot more, but I digress...

I'll "need" DDR5 when I upgrade because I plan to make the jump to upgrade my main rig to AM5 when it comes out. My understanding is that it will require DDR5. Hopefully it won't be considered exotic by that point.