DDR4 4000 MHz Memory Kit Still Runs in Gear 1

The author was surprised to find that their system is still able to run a DDR4 4000 MHz memory kit in gear 1, despite the fact that this mode is typically reserved for low-latency applications. The author notes that there may be some overclocking happening in the background to allow the memory controller to function at higher frequencies. However, the use of gear 1 seems to be fine for this particular setup.

DDR5 on the Other Hand

In contrast, DDR5 is a different story. The author found that it runs in default in gear 2, likely due to the high frequencies involved. When they attempted to switch to gear 1, they were unable to boot into Windows even with significant reductions in memory frequency. This suggests that the current DDR5 kits are not yet mature enough to support high-latency applications.

Performance Comparison

Despite the limitations of DDR5, the author notes that it does perform slightly better than a low-latency DDR4 3200 kit when it comes to gaming. However, the gains are relatively small, with less than a three percent performance difference between the two kits in games like Cyberpunk and Rainbow Six Siege. In Death Stranding, the performance gap is similar, with a two percent difference.

Focus on DDR4 for Gaming

For focus builds, particularly those focused on gaming, the author recommends sticking with DDR4 memory. The current pricing of DDR5 kits makes them relatively expensive compared to DDR4, and the performance gains are not substantial enough to justify the cost difference. Additionally, since DDR4 is still widely available and affordable, it's a good option for those looking to upgrade their system.

DDR5 in Production Workloads

However, when it comes to production workloads, the story changes. The author notes that they were able to run a 3200 MHz DDR4 kit in gear 1, which provided a slight edge over DDR5 kits. The lead is relatively small, with margins ranging from a few percent to several percent depending on the benchmark and workload. However, the author did find one specific workflow where DDR5 performance was significantly better: video transcoding in Adobe Media Encoder.

DDR4 Still the Better Choice

Overall, the author concludes that DDR4 remains the better choice for most users, particularly those looking for gaming performance. While DDR5 may offer some advantages in certain workloads, the current pricing and performance gaps make it less attractive. For production tasks or workflows that require high memory bandwidth, DDR5 may be worth considering. However, for most users, sticking with DDR4 is still the best option.

DDR4 Pricing

One of the main benefits of using DDR4 is its relatively low cost compared to DDR5. The author notes that there are many options available for DDR4 kits, ranging from 3200 MHz CL14 to higher speeds like 3800 MHz CL18. These options can be found linked below.

Conclusion

The author hopes that this article has been helpful in clarifying the performance differences between DDR4 and DDR5 memory kits. While DDR5 may offer some advantages in certain workloads, the current pricing and performance gaps make it less attractive for most users. As a general rule, sticking with DDR4 is still the better choice for gaming performance and cost savings.

Links to DDR4 Memory Kits

For those interested in purchasing a DDR4 memory kit, the author has linked several options below:

* [Insert link to DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 kit]

* [Insert link to DDR4 3600 MHz CL16 kit]

* [Insert link to DDR4 3800 MHz CL18 kit]

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso this video is going to be a quick comparison of ddr4 and the newer faster ddr5 memory and ultimately if you're going with the new intel alder lake build which one you should go with as we'll see there are some very specific workloads out there where ddr5 memory is just monstrously faster than ddr4 but that's far from the entire picture firstly pricing and availability of ddr5 is one of the bigger challenges here and at the moment at least you're looking at paying over double for what you'd pay for a similar capacity of a ddr4 memory kit so with that in mind the performance differences do really need to be substantial to justify that cost the other challenge here is when it comes to your motherboard options because your choice here is either ddr5 only or ddr4 only generally it's the more affordable up to mid-range motherboards which will be compatible with ddr4 and then as you get more into the enthusiast motherboard options that's when they become ddr5 only and you know mostly this is not a problem because if you're going with an affordable motherboard option anyway you're probably going to pair that with the you know more affordable memory kit which is ddr4 but let's say you wanted to go with an enthusiast motherboard and ddr4 that's not really an option anymore so let's say you wanted to go with a motherboard with better rear i o or a better vrm maybe you wanted thunderbolt 4 or 10 gigabit ethernet those motherboards just typically don't have a ddr4 option available there are still definitely good ddr4 motherboards out there plenty good enough for most of the systems that you guys will be building but the top tier stuff if you're building a workstation for example that's ddr5 only now before we jump into the testing and compare these different memory kits i do want to clear up something that i said in my 12 600k and 12 900k review and that's the top memory speed at which you can run gear one for the memory controller on the cpu for those who don't know gear one syncs the imc with your memory frequency and is the preferred mode to be running whereas gear 2 allows you to run higher frequency but at the same time won't be in sync with the memory controller and so some of the time you will actually get worse performance so in those videos i said that 3 200 megahertz was the max that the memory controller could support in gear 1 and that beyond that you'd need to run gear 2 which has a latency penalty but i was wrong and you are actually able to run a ddr4 4 000 megahertz memory kit still in gear 1. so that was a bit surprising there's likely a bit of overclocking happening here in the background for the memory controller but nonetheless gear 1 which is the preferred low latency mode that does seem to be fine here for upwards of 4 000 megahertz memory ddr5 on the other hand is a different story it runs in default in gear 2 probably because the frequencies are so high at least on the motherboards that i've tested i could not get it to run in the synced gear one mode whatsoever i tried lowering the memory frequency dramatically and still nothing i just couldn't boot into windows as soon as i made any changes to that stock ddr5 profile so what does all of this mean for performance well basically not a whole lot despite ddr5 only supporting the gear 2 mode because the frequencies are so high it is a bit faster than a low latency ddr4 3200 kit when it comes to gaming but the gains here are pretty low by the way the ddr4 3200 megahertz kit that we're using here is cl14 so overall it does perform pretty good in cyberpunk for example we're seeing less than a three percent performance gain between a 3200 megahertz cl 14 kit and a ddr5 6000 megahertz cl40 kit very similar story in rainbow six siege about a two percent gain there with no real difference between the fifty two hundred and six thousand megahertz kit and we see pretty much the same thing when it comes to death stranding so for gaming focus builds at least for now with the current ddr5 pricing and the relatively low speeds that they're currently at compared to where they will be in like a year or two ddr4 memory is simply the way to go but what about production workloads well here the results are a bit more interesting since we're able to run our 3200 megahertz cl 14 ddr4 kit in gear one i'm guessing that low latency is what's giving it the slight edge in some of these workloads but not all of them the lead here seems to trade between ddr4 and ddr5 depending on the benchmark and generally the margins are pretty small between them however i did find one workload where ddr5 memory performance is just absolutely mental for whatever reason and that's when it comes to video transcoding in adobe media encoder so if you're someone who works with proxy files a lot in your workflow this is probably something to consider at least ddr5 5200 megahertz is 21 faster than our ddr4 kit here and surprisingly we get another four percent boost by jumping to ddr5 6000 so yeah some really big performance margins here but this is also a very specific workflow this performance also carries over when we take a look at gaming while performing the same transcoding benchmark in the background and again we just see absolutely huge performance gains here for ddr5 there's a 60 uplift here between ddr4 and ddr5 5200 and again even the 6 000 megahertz kit is able to stretch things noticeably further however this does show that even now with these very early ddr5 kits workflows out there that require a ton of memory bandwidth will provide noticeable performance gains over ddr4 so if you're building like a 12 900k workstation for production tasks and you're not really sparing any expense sure ddr5 might be worth it for you those users can probably ride off their pcs as a business expense anyway for the rest of us though especially those just interested in gaming the answer is 100 ddr4 don't go with anything crazy like a 4400 or 5 000 megahertz kit because keep in mind you still want to be able to run the memory controller in gear one so from a low latency 3200 kit up to like a cl 18 3800 megahertz kit really there are a ton of options out there that are suitable and i'll leave a few of them linked down below the good news is that ddr4 is really really cheap at the moment especially in comparison to ddr5 you can get a pretty high speed high capacity kit and the performance difference as we saw versus ddr5 is really really low i mean it's like two to three percent especially when it comes to gaming uh this also means that of course you can potentially reuse what you're currently using in your system and so you know you do save quite a bit of cash there otherwise really hope this helped you out i will leave some links down below for those who are interested in picking something up and i will see you all in the next oneso this video is going to be a quick comparison of ddr4 and the newer faster ddr5 memory and ultimately if you're going with the new intel alder lake build which one you should go with as we'll see there are some very specific workloads out there where ddr5 memory is just monstrously faster than ddr4 but that's far from the entire picture firstly pricing and availability of ddr5 is one of the bigger challenges here and at the moment at least you're looking at paying over double for what you'd pay for a similar capacity of a ddr4 memory kit so with that in mind the performance differences do really need to be substantial to justify that cost the other challenge here is when it comes to your motherboard options because your choice here is either ddr5 only or ddr4 only generally it's the more affordable up to mid-range motherboards which will be compatible with ddr4 and then as you get more into the enthusiast motherboard options that's when they become ddr5 only and you know mostly this is not a problem because if you're going with an affordable motherboard option anyway you're probably going to pair that with the you know more affordable memory kit which is ddr4 but let's say you wanted to go with an enthusiast motherboard and ddr4 that's not really an option anymore so let's say you wanted to go with a motherboard with better rear i o or a better vrm maybe you wanted thunderbolt 4 or 10 gigabit ethernet those motherboards just typically don't have a ddr4 option available there are still definitely good ddr4 motherboards out there plenty good enough for most of the systems that you guys will be building but the top tier stuff if you're building a workstation for example that's ddr5 only now before we jump into the testing and compare these different memory kits i do want to clear up something that i said in my 12 600k and 12 900k review and that's the top memory speed at which you can run gear one for the memory controller on the cpu for those who don't know gear one syncs the imc with your memory frequency and is the preferred mode to be running whereas gear 2 allows you to run higher frequency but at the same time won't be in sync with the memory controller and so some of the time you will actually get worse performance so in those videos i said that 3 200 megahertz was the max that the memory controller could support in gear 1 and that beyond that you'd need to run gear 2 which has a latency penalty but i was wrong and you are actually able to run a ddr4 4 000 megahertz memory kit still in gear 1. so that was a bit surprising there's likely a bit of overclocking happening here in the background for the memory controller but nonetheless gear 1 which is the preferred low latency mode that does seem to be fine here for upwards of 4 000 megahertz memory ddr5 on the other hand is a different story it runs in default in gear 2 probably because the frequencies are so high at least on the motherboards that i've tested i could not get it to run in the synced gear one mode whatsoever i tried lowering the memory frequency dramatically and still nothing i just couldn't boot into windows as soon as i made any changes to that stock ddr5 profile so what does all of this mean for performance well basically not a whole lot despite ddr5 only supporting the gear 2 mode because the frequencies are so high it is a bit faster than a low latency ddr4 3200 kit when it comes to gaming but the gains here are pretty low by the way the ddr4 3200 megahertz kit that we're using here is cl14 so overall it does perform pretty good in cyberpunk for example we're seeing less than a three percent performance gain between a 3200 megahertz cl 14 kit and a ddr5 6000 megahertz cl40 kit very similar story in rainbow six siege about a two percent gain there with no real difference between the fifty two hundred and six thousand megahertz kit and we see pretty much the same thing when it comes to death stranding so for gaming focus builds at least for now with the current ddr5 pricing and the relatively low speeds that they're currently at compared to where they will be in like a year or two ddr4 memory is simply the way to go but what about production workloads well here the results are a bit more interesting since we're able to run our 3200 megahertz cl 14 ddr4 kit in gear one i'm guessing that low latency is what's giving it the slight edge in some of these workloads but not all of them the lead here seems to trade between ddr4 and ddr5 depending on the benchmark and generally the margins are pretty small between them however i did find one workload where ddr5 memory performance is just absolutely mental for whatever reason and that's when it comes to video transcoding in adobe media encoder so if you're someone who works with proxy files a lot in your workflow this is probably something to consider at least ddr5 5200 megahertz is 21 faster than our ddr4 kit here and surprisingly we get another four percent boost by jumping to ddr5 6000 so yeah some really big performance margins here but this is also a very specific workflow this performance also carries over when we take a look at gaming while performing the same transcoding benchmark in the background and again we just see absolutely huge performance gains here for ddr5 there's a 60 uplift here between ddr4 and ddr5 5200 and again even the 6 000 megahertz kit is able to stretch things noticeably further however this does show that even now with these very early ddr5 kits workflows out there that require a ton of memory bandwidth will provide noticeable performance gains over ddr4 so if you're building like a 12 900k workstation for production tasks and you're not really sparing any expense sure ddr5 might be worth it for you those users can probably ride off their pcs as a business expense anyway for the rest of us though especially those just interested in gaming the answer is 100 ddr4 don't go with anything crazy like a 4400 or 5 000 megahertz kit because keep in mind you still want to be able to run the memory controller in gear one so from a low latency 3200 kit up to like a cl 18 3800 megahertz kit really there are a ton of options out there that are suitable and i'll leave a few of them linked down below the good news is that ddr4 is really really cheap at the moment especially in comparison to ddr5 you can get a pretty high speed high capacity kit and the performance difference as we saw versus ddr5 is really really low i mean it's like two to three percent especially when it comes to gaming uh this also means that of course you can potentially reuse what you're currently using in your system and so you know you do save quite a bit of cash there otherwise really hope this helped you out i will leave some links down below for those who are interested in picking something up and i will see you all in the next one\n"