I recently found that both sticks in my G.SKILL TridentZ Neo DDR4-3600 CL16 kit were defective, so I sent them in for an RMA and received a brand-new replacement. While waiting, I bought a Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 kit for €207.82 about a month ago. Now I need to decide which kit to keep and which to sell. The new G.SKILL replacement could sell for around €280, while the lightly used Corsair kit might sell for about €180. My system has a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and it is mainly used for gaming. Is the faster G.SKILL kit worth keeping, or would I be better off selling it and using the Corsair memory?
3 Answers
Since the performance difference will be difficult to notice in normal gaming, selling the brand-new G.SKILL kit would probably make the most financial sense. You could keep the Corsair kit and recover more money, unless you specifically want the best-performing memory configuration.
For a Ryzen 5000 system, DDR4-3600 is generally the better match because it can run close to the platform’s preferred memory and Infinity Fabric settings. The G.SKILL kit also has better performance potential, so I’d keep that one if the replacement is fully tested and working.
The practical performance difference between DDR4-3200 CL16 and DDR4-3600 CL16 is pretty small, often around 1% in gaming. I’d keep whichever kit you prefer and base the decision mostly on how much money you can get by selling the other one.
That makes sense. I was skeptical because the price difference between 3200 and 3600 memory is much larger than the performance difference, but the memory market seems pretty strange.