Stop WASTING Money on Fancy RAM

It seems this RAM crisis just won't stop. Earlier today, a customer's wallet was brutalized at the local Computers R Us. Live at the scene is special correspondent Riley Murdoch. Thank you, Linus. The scene here is chaos. There is affected customers everywhere. Excuse me, excuse me, sir. I see you're holding a high speed DDR5 kit there. Can you explain why you paid extra for that instead of a lower speed kit? I don't know, man. Everybody tells me I need the more expensive stuff, but it's just so expensive. I'm just happy they didn't take my other kidney. Should we tell them? Are you a gamer, sir? Yes. Then we've got some fantastic news for you, because we tested four CPUs at eight different speeds of DDR5, running as slow as 4,800 megatransfers per second. And it turns out you might not need to spend as much on memory as you thought. Ooh, that does not look great. Good thing he was born with two of them. But hey, it's not all bad. Let me cheer you up with this segue to our sponsor. Can we get this guy some help? Synergy. Synergy lets you use one keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers on your local network. You can even do things like copy and paste in between computers. Check them out with our link in the video description. The TLDR of our extensive testing is that while some CPUs do obviously benefit from faster memory, AMD's recent statement that their popular X3D gaming CPUs are super down to shack up with even the slowest memory seems to be pretty much accurate. We found that at typical gaming resolutions and settings, there was almost no difference between kits that run at industry standard or JEDEC speeds and faster overclocked gaming RAM. Now, this is not going to completely solve the problem. Even slower memory has been impacted by recent price increases. But hey, at least it gives us some options. Let's find out then how much performance we might be giving up, starting with Intel, where unfortunately, the story is not quite as rosy as AMD's X3D chips. We chose both a last gen and a current gen representative, and we used our standard labs test benches. Testing took forever, by the way, because we had to use the same memory kit across each platform, which meant swapping out a lot of RAM. Let's start with gaming on Raptor Lake. Looking strictly at our geo mean across all games at 1080p, it's pretty clear that our 14900K loves fast DDR5. So if your grandma made a strategic DDR5 investment last year and you can get some 8400 megatransfer per second CL40, to the moon it goes! At least in certain games like Ashes of the Benchmark, Cyberpunk, and Red Dead Redemption 2. The good news is though, as long as you don't pair it with the slowest kit you can find, it won't suffer too much. As for Intel's newer Core Ultra 285K, good news! It couldn't even run our fastest kit. And as for the rest, as long as you're using something that's faster than JEDEC, basically, don't worry about it. When we look at the all important 1% lows, there is at most a handful of FPS difference across every game and resolution that we tested, to the point where I would say that unless you have an FPS counter in the corner, you would never know the difference. And this is especially true as your resolution and your in-game details scale up. Now, you're probably wondering at this point, if these differences are so small, why were all of you reviewers acting like RAM speed mattered before? It's all about the context, guys. When we were talking about 20 or 30 bucks to get a few percent performance improvement on your 1500 or 2000 dollar gaming PC, that's a no-brainer. Who doesn't want bang for the buck? But we're not talking 20 or 30 bucks, we're talking 200 or 300 dollars for a higher speed kit. That changes the math completely. Or does it? Maybe productivity will tell a different story. Okay, not in Blender, but our Godot compile test does see a decent improvement with higher speed memory on the 14900K. And that's not a completely isolated case. While many of our productivity tests do mirror our gaming tests across both Intel's current and last gen chips, there are a significant number of results here where spending far more on your memory can yield a meaningful difference in performance to the point where, if you're making money with your machine, you might want to consider ponying up for a high speed, low latency kit, even at today's extortionate pricing. Which is exactly the problem that consumers are facing right now. You wanna play video games and you gotta budget accordingly. Well, Joe Workstation user, he's not playing games. He wants to compile his code faster. So he submits a requisition to the IT department who goes, yeah, if it'll make you more productive, go for it. We're gonna have a companion lttlabs.com article, by the way, that dives a little deeper into which business use cases might benefit and which ones won't. On the subject of business, check out the new sand colored tech pants at lttstore.com. They offer loads of utility with hidden pockets galore while keeping you stylish on the job. Now, let's change gears and talk a little bit about AMD. Don't you guys love it when twice a day, the corporate puffery clock gets it right. Just look at those beautifully aligned graphs on our 9800 X3D. Okay, there is a little bit of variance. Our 4800 megatransfer per second kit does sit in last place and 6000 megatransfer CL30 is still the sweet spot. But turn on ray tracing or up the resolution and things become even more samelier than before. Like on Intel, Cyberpunk and Ashes show the biggest spread in our 1080p results, but it's a much smaller gap. And realistically, there are cases here where using 16 gig versus 24 gig modules is gonna make as much of a difference or more. 3DB cache for the win. As for the regular cache, it might be for the win too. It turns out that while our 9950X did stumble a little bit with our slowest JDEC kit, overall, as long as you can get your hands on something, anything with a tuned Expo profile, you probably won't notice a difference, especially at risk of sounding like a broken record, at risk of sounding like a broken record, especially if you turn up your in-game details or kick your resolution up to 4K. Moving on to productivity, we've got a similar story to what we saw in Intel, just through a different colored lens. The JDEC kit is definitely the slowest, demonstrating that overclocked memory does have a reason to exist, just not at the current prices. Beyond that, there were occasional cases where faster memory or especially sweet spot memory that runs in sync with AMD's Infinity Fabric at nice low latencies did result in measurable gains, but outside of those specific use cases, like Godot, the differences are not gonna be enough to ruin your day. So in conclusion, don't be this guy. If you're a gamer and high-speed memory is available for a modest price delta, it can make a lot of sense, especially if you're on an older Intel platform. But right now, I just can't recommend it, especially to the tens of thousands of you that are buying X3D processors for gaming. By the way, we're gonna have X3D processors and all the stuff that we used on our benches linked in the video description if you guys wanted to check something up for your next rig. Just don't expect any great deals on the RAM down there. As for the non-gaming folks, man, I really feel for the cottage industry professionals right now, the folks who do work at home that requires faster RAM or especially a lot of RAM. It's hard to care too much about corporate's workstation budget, but if you're an at-home developer or you're a contract creative professional, it is a super sucky time to need an upgrade. The only good news I have for you is that you can shave a few bucks off of your budget for now and then with the money you saved, hopefully get something a little faster once the bubble pops. Any time now would be nice. All right, well, I guess it's not happening yet, but while we continue to wait, here's a word from our sponsor. Synergy, if you have multiple computers on your local network and you have to run from system to system to get any work done, you should check out Synergy. They let you use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers and you can move your cursor in between devices as well as copy and paste. And unlike KVM switching, there isn't those few seconds of waiting. It supports hotkeys, TLS encryption, and clipboard sharing. Synergy isn't a subscription service. There are no reoccurring payments. Just choose which one of their three tiers fits your needs most and you go from there. In the end, it's just less clutter and confusion. With Synergy, one keyboard and mouse is all you need to control every computer in your setup. Grab 50% off using code LDT at checkout with our link down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to check out the last time we did this, but with DDR4. So if you want to pick up like an older Intel 12th or 13th gen chip and pair that with some nice fancy DDR4, you can decide for yourself exactly how much to spend.