I'm considering buying some Kingston Fury DDR5 RAM and leaning towards a 64GB kit with a CAS latency (CL) of 32 priced at $260. However, I've spotted a deal on a Crucial 64GB DDR5 kit at just $140, but it has a CL of 40. I have a Ryzen 9 9950X processor, and both kits support EXPO. I'm mostly into casual gaming but also want to run local AI models, virtual machines, Docker containers, do some video editing, and content creation. Will going for the slower CL40 have a noticeable impact? What's everyone's thoughts on DDR5 (2x32GB) 6400MHz CL40 compared to DDR5 (2x32GB) 6400MHz CL32?
1 Answer
Different applications respond differently to RAM speed and latency. Some games might show a significant difference based on latency, while others, like AV1 encoding in HandBrake, are heavily impacted by XMP settings. The CL32 kit is pricier, but considering the overall budget of your build, 6000MHz with CL30 might be a sweet spot since AMD tends to officially support up to 5600MHz. It’s stable for most applications, and since you're looking to run AI models overnight, stability is key. A 6400MHz kit isn’t guaranteed to work perfectly, so unless you specifically need that bandwidth, I'd be cautious about the upgrade.
Thanks for the insight! I was actually thinking about going for two sets to hit 128GB at 6000MHz. I don’t have a strong need for bandwidth right now, so maybe quad-channel is the way to go. Just built a really nice rig about every 7-8 years, and I'm in the process of gathering components now. Just picked up that 9950X during the sale. I thought AMD capped at 6000MHz, so I might need to check out the 5600 CL30 options instead. I’ll explore that since this is my first AMD setup.