As everyone is aware, the world is facing some major economic headwinds right now, with inflation in particular being a hot topic. A dollar today just doesn’t go as far as it did before the pandemic. But while graphics cards and motherboards have taken steps up in price, SSDs and DDR memory have gone in the opposite direction.
Now is a fantastic time to take the plunge on a memory upgrade. In fact, prices have decreased so much, our thinking is that higher capacity kits are absolutely worth considering. As is traditionally the case with memory, faster speeds and higher capacities deliver diminishing performance returns, but for the sake of an few extra dollars, it really is worth buying a higher capacity kit that will happily last you for many years.
Think about the first dual channel DDR4 kits from mid 2015. Z170 motherboards and 6th Gen Skylake CPUs were the first mainstream products to support dual channel DDR4. 2x 4GB kits were common, but today that’s considered low end. Even 2x 8GB is considered fairly standard today. For a gaming rig anyway.
In those days you could buy 16GB DDR4 modules, but they were very expensive. If you did invest in them back in 2015, they’d still be perfectly usable today, some 8 years later. But the price premium for higher capacity kits simply does not exist now as it did then.
So while high capacity kits are generally not needed for consumer or gaming systems, the price of them isn’t so much a case of asking yourself if you need it or not, it’s more a case of why wouldn’t you? That 2x 24GB or 2x 32GB kit should end up having a nice long life. Many years from now, you’ll surely appreciate that extra capacity for a relatively small outlay.
(Image credit: Future)
Special thanks to G.Skill for supporting this article with a tasty pair of 2x 32GB kits. The first is a lovely looking 2x 32GB set of Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-6400, now available in white! I do love a nice white build.
The second kit is no less desirable. It’s a 2x 32GB set of G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600. I have the silver version on hand, and its currently just $155! That could be the last DDR4 kit you’d ever need to buy.
DDR5 prices are plummeting
(Image credit: Future)
It’s pretty shocking to see just how quickly the DDR5 standard has advanced in speed and timings. The first DDR5 memory launched at the same time as Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs in November of 2021. That was a bad time, as it was right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. That meant lockdowns, worker furloughs, and generally a pretty crappy time for everyone. And it meant DDR5 prices were absolutely ridiculous. A shortage of power management IC’s was cited as a reason for DDR5 scarcity.
Several of the early DDR5 memory kits I reviewed were simply unavailable, and those that were, were massively overpriced. Even a few months later, prices were still farcical. I have a good example. In March of 2022 I reviewed a G.Skill Trident Z5 2x 16GB DDR5-6400 C32 kit. It was priced at $569 £115