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DDR5 RAM arrived late last year, but it’s taken until now to see the first semi-reasonable prices for a kit of next-generation memory. CCL are currently selling a kit of Crucial DDR5-4800 for £89.94, more than £30 cheaper than the same kit is on Amazon.
This is the first time I’ve seen a DDR5 kit of any description under £100, so if you’re considering a 12th-gen Intel (or AMD Ryzen 7000) build, then this might be just what you need.
Hardware wizard James tested DDR5 vs DDR4 earlier this year and found that it does offer a performance advantage over DDR4 in some games – but DDR4 remains the better value choice. However, that calculus is slowly shifting, and DDR5 is starting to become a viable option – helped of course by price drops like this one.
I ran a similar set of experiments between DDR4 and DDR5 for Digital Foundry last month, and found that performance deltas between high-spec DDR4 and entry-level DDR5 ranged from 1% (in Crysis 3 Remastered, Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Far Cry 6) to 25% (in Ashes of the Singularity Escalation). If you instead look at fast DDR5-6600, the percentages tend to increase by around 5% across the board.
So some games can exhibit huge gains, but mostly you’re buying into a DDR5 motherboard to be able to put in faster RAM a few years down the line, when faster modules are available and prices are more reasonable. If that’s you, then this deal is a solid choice to get you sorted for the short term!