Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 / DDR5-5600

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 / DDR5-5600

Micron recently sent over their latest Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 and DDR5-5600 memory kits for testing with these low cost options for running with the latest Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake and AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. Here's a look at how these affordable DDR5 memory options are performing and a look at the Linux workloads that can benefit from higher frequency memory.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/crucial-ddr5-5200-5600

[milkylainen]

Performance/$ over the entire system would be more relevant?
I mean, this is adding upwards 30% more performance.
Looks like a great upgrade for the difference in $?

[grigi]

Agreed a 10% geomean speedup for $69 extra over a $700-$2000 system is very good value.

[Zapitron]

Fascinating. Why did the DDR5-4800 do so well in some of the tests? I guess it's something to do with the timings, but apparently not the CAS Latency unless I misread something.

Thanks for doing this one, Michael. I almost never get to compare RAM.

[BillBroadley]

I'd like to see a similar review for ECC memory. I think ECC is well worth it and AMD desktop CPUs support it on AM5 (depending on motherboard) and Intel desktop CPUs support it, assuming you get the right chipset.

[BillBroadley]

Fascinating. Why did the DDR5-4800 do so well in some of the tests? I guess it's something to do with the timings, but apparently not the CAS Latency unless I misread something.

Thanks for doing this one, Michael. I almost never get to compare RAM.

I looked and didn't find any DDR5-4800 performance wins. Careful on the graphs, the DDR5-4800 often won on performance per $, but that's based on the dimm price, not the system price. IMO component choices should be made on system perf/system price. That way you can decide to balance CPU, GPU, ram, NVMe instead of buying the best price/perf ram which might be the worst price/perf system.

Did I miss any DDR5-4800 performance wins? The AMD docs I've seen say DDR5-6000 is the best speed, because it runs with a 1:1 IFC ratio, anything faster has a worse ratio.

[pieman]

could you also test these kits on your alder / raptor lake system? be curious to see how intel performs between 4800 to 6000.

[willmore]

I'm amazed at the timings on that DDR5-6000 memory! Those are crazy fast and the benchmarks bear it out. Considering how they win in some performance/$ or at least lag/lead the normal memory by a small fraction, they seem completely worth it.

How is that memory that fast? If you convert from clocks to absolute time for those latency values, it's even more amazing!

[Michael]

I'd like to see a similar review for ECC memory. I think ECC is well worth it and AMD desktop CPUs support it on AM5 (depending on motherboard) and Intel desktop CPUs support it, assuming you get the right chipset.

Unfortunately I don't too often receive memory review samples as not a primary focus for Phoronix (and vendors don't seem to be too interested in the Linux niche per se for things like RAM), let alone ECC memory review samples :/ but if I get any, certainly will run such tests...

[Velocity]

Why so low capacity? Since you can only use two DIMM slots on AM5 socket due to abysmal speeds when using 4 DIMMs, using two of these will give you 32G of RAM. That is what i had more than 10 years ago! It is also 2G per core, where i would like 64G per core. 128G or 256G for a 16-core AM5 system would seem a normal average amount, whereas 512G would be there for power users. But that is not possible at the moment.

In the future 64G modules will come out, so you can at least have 2x64=128G - doable for a 16-core system but still very low. Two compile VMs and you have 0 left.

Due to abysmal RAM capacity, using a fast SSD as 'throw away RAM' is an option, where the SSD is configured as cache and writes like 800G per day and therefore will be dead in a couple of years. But that's all we have for consumer systems right now.

The past 10 years, CPU power has risen considerably, but RAM capacity has only marginally increased. This created a disparity. And sure, some applications like games would require only a few G of RAM but a lot of processing power. But anything productivity related is likely to use multiples of RAM capacity that gamers would use. Gamers also talk about very fast SSDs where actually they would benefit from a larger RAM cache - no SSD is ever going to compete in terms of application-start-performance.

Hence: more RAM capacity. 128G modules for DDR5 would be welcome. Probably will not happen soon so consumer systems will be imbalanced with a lot of CPU power but abysmal RAM capacity - pushing productivity into enterprise-systems that are several orders in magnitude more expensive. Bloody shame!