DDR4 vs DDR5 – will it be worth the upgrade?

Is DDR5 worth it? We take a look at the new RAM specification, and look at a DDR5 vs DDR4 comparison

Aaron Ritchie

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James E Mauro

Mar 4, 2022 at 1:24 pm

It sounds like for most game users, and video editors DDR5 won’t be a major choice until 2 years after its release on the market, like when each of ddr2,dd3,ddr4 came out. If you buy a pc from 2022 to 2024 you will likely see a drop inpreformance. You are limited to 16-64gb before you no longer see any improvements. However this was normaly do to each predicisor having slower timing, while also having faster bandwidth where the 2 cancels each other out. Ddr1 had a timing of 2, where a typical ddr3 had a typical timing of 7, while a ddr4 had a typical timing of 15. If ddr5 actually has the same timing of ddr4 than you would see an improvement. Its usually a couple of years before the overclock bandwidth and decreased timing come onto the market for each DDR generation before it actually improves. However in server applications where the more memory the better, being able to upgrade each chip from a max of 256gb to a max of 512gb should show alot of improvement. Along with decrease power usage.

To conclude, dd3 was only faster than ddr4 for the first 2 years because ddr3 was twice as fast, while ddr4 could not yet carry more than twice the load. Once ddr4 could cary more load and they made it slightly faster did ddr4 become a better option. If ddr5 actually has the same timing as ddr4, than it is already better tham ddr4.
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DJ Emir

Oct 3, 2021 at 7:58 am

Interesting, I was looking to see if DDR5 was coming out soon because I messed up in 2014 when I built my current Computer the new boards were just coming out and I had already researched a bunch of other boards and picked my specked out machine not realizing the latest boards coming out where on a different architecture that allowed for DDR4, While I got some sweet DDR3s at the time for a great price and a good board, GPU and chip set I would not feel as inclined to upgrade my rig again right now had I bought the DDR4 memory and DDR4 compatible board. So sad. So I’m holding out a little longer to make the jump to a higher board and DDR5 so as not to repeat my mistake. I feel the lag when I edit video and sometimes when I edit much larger files in Photoshop. Everything else the computer feels fast and still works great for most tasks including Photoshop Editing, but when I use Sony Vegas or other video editing programs they tend to crash repeatedly when handling certain editing features.
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DDR4 vs DDR5 – will it be worth the upgrade?

The Author Who Worked On This Article

Aaron Ritchie

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