That’s it, that’s the deal.
DDR5 RAM used to be expensive - but fast forward a year or two and now it’s possible to pick up 16GB for a little more than three of your British tenners. That’s right, you can now get a single 16GB stick of DDR5-4800 for £34, or two for £68 - quick maths.
This is by far the best choice when it comes to raw price versus performance, and allows you to build out a DDR5 Intel or AMD system at the absolute minimum cost while still getting a healthy 32GB.
Of course, it is worth noting up front that you definitely don’t want a single stick of DDR5, as this comes with a stiff performance penalty - consider two the minimum!
This is largely only noticeable at 1080p, as you’re likely to be more GPU-limited at 1440p and 4K, and faster DDR5 also doesn’t seem to affect productivity tasks like 3D rendering or video transcoding. So the actual number of situations that you see a benefit is fairly small at this stage - and the actual frame-rate increase at 1080p is typically in the five to 10 percent range if it’s noticeable at all - and the vast majority of gaming scenarios it makes no difference.
So getting the base spec is actually pretty darn smart, even if the DDR5-4800 CL40 spec doesn’t look that impressive. Pair it with a new, good-performance CPU, like that of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 lineup or Intel’s 12th or 13th-gen processors, and you’ll get much better performance maximising your spend on your CPU and GPU than if you dedicate more of that money to RAM.
I think this all should make sense, but I’m curious to see what you think! Let me know in the comments below.
