I've been struggling to find decent RAM at reasonable prices, and all I see are kits with CAS Latency (CL) over 40, particularly under 5200MHz. I'm wondering if it's really as bad as people say, or if I should just go ahead and buy them anyway.
5 Answers
It's definitely better than DDR4, in my opinion. Just remember that while it's cool to chase lower latency and higher speeds, the difference in real-world performance often isn't more than 10%.
I recently found a CL42 128GB kit running at 6400MHz and it's working just fine for me. Don't stress too much about the exact numbers—you might find something that suits your needs.
I've managed to overclock my 64GB 5200 CL40 kit to 6000 CL34, and it's performing well. So there's definitely room for improvement if you're willing to tinker a bit.
You can always try overclocking a JEDEC set of RAM. Even DDR5 5200 CL46 can perform well. Now isn't the time to be too choosy about RAM timings. There's a video showing minimal differences in performance when using high-end setups, so make sure to check that out!
Honestly, it's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The performance impact varies based on your setup, especially the CPU architecture. For instance, Ryzen CPUs (excluding the X3D ones) can really benefit from faster RAM. When comparing a basic 5200 CL40 kit to a 6000 CL30 one, you might see performance boosts up to 30% in some games. Still, in general usage, getting affordable RAM is probably the better route right now.
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