I'm about to buy a prebuilt PC that comes with a single stick of 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 running at 5200MHz CL40. I'm curious if having just one stick is a bad idea for gaming, particularly in competitive Fortnite. I've seen that another option is a dual channel setup with 32GB (2 x 16GB) at CL30, but it costs £200 more. How much difference would it really make?
4 Answers
Honestly, it's not terrible to use one stick, but you might see lower performance compared to dual-channel. With DDR5, it's a bit better since it has more data lanes than DDR4. However, if you mainly play at higher resolutions, the performance loss won't be as noticeable.
The bigger issue here might be the RAM speed itself—5200 CL40 is considered on the slower side. While having one stick isn't ideal, I don’t think it’s a game changer. I used slower sticks for a while and didn't notice a huge impact.
From what I've seen, using a single stick might drop your performance by around 10% in certain situations. If you find a good deal on another stick later, you could always upgrade then.
It really depends on your CPU. If you have an AMD processor (like the Ryzen 5 9600X you mentioned), it performs better with dual-channel RAM. With one stick, you might not get the full potential out of your setup. Intel CPUs can handle single-channel RAM a bit better, but AMD generally benefits a lot from dual-channel configurations.
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