Is it worth grabbing ddr5 ram now if you can find it?

Dutt1113

[H]ard|Gawd
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I will be doing a new build with 12900k and ASUS Z690 Maximus Hero (both pre-ordered) and not sure if I should grab any basic lesser brand ddr5 32gb ram kit that I can find or wait to get something that's not out yet like the nice G.Skill trident Z kits coming soon. The only kit I can find to pre-order is an XPG 32gb ddr5 5200 kit for $300. Do you think the kits coming out like G.Skill and others will be a lot more expensive? Do they all use the same chips so just get the XPG for now?
 
I will be doing a new build with 12900k and ASUS Z690 Maximus Hero (both pre-ordered) and not sure if I should grab any basic lesser brand ddr5 32gb ram kit that I can find or wait to get something that's not out yet like the nice G.Skill trident Z kits coming soon. The only kit I can find to pre-order is an XPG 32gb ddr5 5200 kit for $300. Do you think the kits coming out like G.Skill and others will be a lot more expensive? Do they all use the same chips so just get the XPG for now?

I don't think anyone can answer these questions, we don't have any reviews or anything to really go on here. You are going to have to accept whatever you get since you are pre-ordering all of this stuff.
 
I'm more concerned about availability. Do you think I'll lose out on getting any if I don't grab some now?
 
It could be my lack of following tech news in the last 17 year's, but I feel like if it was worth it (to get DDR5 at this price point instead of DDR4), there would have let reviewer test them or put the obscure and unfair benchmark of DDr5 vs DDR4 in the released marketing presentation.

Maybe I just missed those has well and they are there.
 
I would just get a cheap kit and try your luck overclocking it.
Wait and see what comes out in the not to distant future.

Seems the 6600c36 sticks from G.Skill will be using Samsung chips while slightly slower kits will be Hynix\Micron.
So maybe looking for Samsung chips would be worth it, time will tell.
 
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No. The initial models of DDR5 have unknown overclocking / tightening performance. It's not clear how overclocking will work with the on-die voltage regulator - early motherboards won't have this ironed out. I would even wait a year and buy the 2nd generation mainstream platform or 10 nm HEDT. The memory controller in the 2nd generation CPUs could also see substantial improvements like Skylake-X to Cascade Lake-X.
 
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You're always going to pay an early adopter tax when moving to a new technology like DDR5. You don't have to look that far back to see the same thing happened with DDR4. You were limited to 2133/2400/2666? speeds and within a year you had faster modules, lower latencies, and lower pricing. There is no reason to think the same thing won't happen with DDR5.
 
Ive watched a lot of memory standards launch over the years, and early adopters always pay more and get the slowest speeds. At least it wasnt as bad as the early Athlon/P4 days where you had PC-133, DDR, and Rambus to choose from. I had ended up buying and Asus Athlon board for a family member that let you use PC-133 or DDR. It let me buy some reasonably priced PC-133 and then later upgrade to DDR once the price dropped.
 
My $0.02. There are a few reviews. IIRC the most optimistic of them see a 20% improvement. Now go use you old DDR4 machine in SMP mode then in DOCP/XMP mode. The delta will with DDR5 will likely be less than that. At some point DDR5 will be stomping all over DDR4. This is not that time. Everything on it is new and different, and I suspect that to exploit that later, you will be buying new ram and a new motherboard to go with it.
 
The problem is I don't want the Z690 DDR4 boards. They don't have the connectivity I need.

I looked over the Asus Z690 DDR MB manual, and it just doesn't do it for me. My feeling is that the DDR5 memory is for all practical purposes no upgrade in speed. Doubling the Frequency and then Doubling the Latency, well you can see how that would work out, just like it is.
 
Like I found with DDR4 early on, you buy in and get those super fast top of the range DDR4 3000 sticks then 4 months later 4000+ is about. I think its worth waiting a year myself then go in.
I'm taking this approach as well.
 
Anyone got any tips for monitoring stock, to actually buy some DDR5 when it's in stock?
 
I think it would be fine grabbing a set of ddr5 5200 ram if you can find it for around $300. Use it to get your system running slightly faster ram wise vs ddr4 and use until the good fast low latency ddr5 comes out later and then you start to see the big improvement
 
How could there be almost nothing available for the Alder Lake launch on the 4th, and still nothing two weeks later? I've seen graphics cards in stock at MSRP far more than DDR5. o_O

I'm getting ever closer to returning my 12700K and going Ryzen. I don't want DDR4 because the available motherboards are, well, shit.
 
How could there be almost nothing available for the Alder Lake launch on the 4th, and still nothing two weeks later? I've seen graphics cards in stock at MSRP far more than DDR5. o_O

I'm getting ever closer to returning my 12700K and going Ryzen. I don't want DDR4 because the available motherboards are, well, shit.

I think I'm going to return my 12900K. This thing will be too toasty for an ITX build.
 
I think I'm going to return my 12900K. This thing will be too toasty for an ITX build.
Depends how quiet you want it to be and if you want it running at max power limits without any thermal throttling.
It would be easy to keep cool in a ITX build with a loud enough fan.
 
I think I'm going to return my 12900K. This thing will be too toasty for an ITX build.
You might be right. That processor is more for a harder workload. But you may want to think about how long you will run it at high load. If you are just gaming with it or watching movies, the temp may/will be pretty low. The whole idea behind the tiered cores are efficiency and low temp running. If you are rendering video or 3-D, then an ITX build might not be ideal assuming you are going small footprint case.
 
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