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

[watzupken]

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

This is not true. When you say "power user", it will depend on the individual's use case. It is clear that there is no obvious advantage of going with DDR5 now when it comes to performance. Most DDR5 I manage to find are either 4800 or 5200, which is not a big upgrade from a fast DDR4 3600 onwards. And in software that is latency sensitive, DDR5 may regress.
People interested in DDR5 now, likely fall into the below 2 categories in my opinion,
1. Users with use cases that will benefit from getting the fastest DDR5 now, and not so much the base JEDEC speed,

2. PC enthusiasts that just wants to upgrade for the sake of upgrading and don't mind paying the steep premium.

 

[-Fran-]

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


Well, looks like some DDR5 is causing motherboards to die a fiery death... So, good enough reason to wait? LOL

I'm really curious about what Asus has to say.

EDIT: Well, Bullzoid has something to say!

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VkO4wiEAY4


Regards.

 

[setx]

Article's title is plain stupid: you can't "upgrade" your RAM DDR4 -> DDR5, no motherboard supports both as far as I know. And other than current Intel platform (that is quite uninteresting), nothing gives you a choice.
So, in general, it's not even a question what type of RAM to use.

 

[InvalidError]

Article's title is plain stupid: you can't "upgrade" your RAM DDR4 -> DDR5, no motherboard supports both as far as I know. And other than current Intel platform (that is quite uninteresting), nothing gives you a choice.
So, in general, it's not even a question what type of RAM to use.

The point of the article at the time of writing was whether it was worth it or not to spend an extra ~$150 on going with a DDR5 Intel platform + RAM vs a DDR4 one.

And as usual, the first round of next-gen memory with the first generation of CPUs using it is hardly ever worth bothering with besides a handful of special cases.

 

[DataMeister]

I was going to say I'm surprised you opted for DDR5 with CL36. That seems pretty high when G.Skill is offering some with CL28 for only $110. It would have been a lot more interesting to compare that with the DDR4.

Then I noticed the comments are from 2021. So this must be an outdated article before the 13th gen hardware was released. I guess it makes sense to use outdated parts in that case.

 

[ct007]

"To ensure a level playing field, both DDR4 and DDR4..."

Where are the proof readers? I already have a job.

 

[bit_user]

And as usual, the first round of next-gen memory with the first generation of CPUs using it is hardly ever worth bothering with besides a handful of special cases.

If you call heavily-threaded workloads "special cases", sure.

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Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1704...hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/8​

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Yes, they used DDR4-3200 CL22 and DDR5-4800 CL40. I'll have you know that I just bought some DDR4 and 3200 CL22 was the fastest available ECC UDIMM spec I could find. Likewise, DDR5-4800 CL40 still seems to be the fastest DDR5 ECC UDIMM. So, for me, their testing is exactly on point.

For gamerz, using OC'd gamer memory, on gamer boardz, yeah you could get faster DDR4. Still, not high enough for DDR4 to nullify the inherent bandwidth and parallelism advantages of DDR5, but it'll close much of the gap vs. DDR5-4800 CL40. Then again, if you're going to go with OC'd DDR4, you really should be comparing it with OC'd DDR5.

 

[bit_user]

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 an extra capacity to store parity, representing another added cost to DDR5 (in addition to the PMIC). On-die ECC isn't a replacement for standard ECC, but customers will use both in unison in a server or enterprise environment.

DDR5 ECC DIMMs contain 25% more DRAM chips, in to retain the additional parity information. So, you not only get data protection over the data bus, but it also protects the data resident on the DIMM.

Another point about DDR5's on-chip ECC is that I believe it's up to the DRAM vendor whether & how much die space to allocate to ECC. From what I've heard, they have so far used ECC at a coarser granularity, meaning it doesn't offer as much protection.

Finally, on-die ECC isn't just there because memory makers felt like gifting us more reliability. It's there both because smaller cell sizes are more prone to errors and because they increased the refresh interval by several fold, thereby increasing the likelihood of errors. The amount of on-die ECC they allocate should be just enough to paper over these two phenomena.

1. DDR5's on-die ECC is complemented by link ECC, which does cover transmission errors.

I believe there's no link ECC without the additional DRAM chips of a full ECC DIMM. If you have a source that specifies otherwise, please share.