One of the biggest pain points of building a new PC around the latest generation hardware from AMD and Intel is buying DDR5 memory. Sure, you can get away with DDR4 RAM on
Raptor Lake, but DDR5 is preferred and is outright required for
Zen 4. The good news is pricing on DDR5 has been steadily declining. Even better, a handful of DDR5 memory kits are discounted for Cyber Monday.
Pictured above is a
32GB Kingston Fury Beast RGB DDR5-6000 memory kit that's on sale for
$196.84 on Amazon (save $83.15). That's still not cheap for 32GB, but this same kit was commanding north of $250 before this discount came into play, and went for as much as $339.99 just a few weeks ago.
This is a fast kit with a 6,000 MT/s data rate. Kingston says, "Each module has been tested to run at DDR5-6000 at a low latency timing of 40-40-40 at 1.35V." That also happens to be the settings for XMP Profile #1. The second XMP profile is configured to run at DDR5-5600 at CL40-40-40 and 1.25V, while the third XMP profile is configured for DDR5-4800 at CL38-38-38 and 1.1V.
If you're looking for a higher capacity solution and/or prefer Corsair, you can grab a
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200 memory kit for
$259.99 at Amazon (save $20). This kit started out at $559.99 at the end of March and has been dropping in price ever since. Its biggest decline came in the summer when it went from $438 down to around $340, and now it's listed as its lowest price to date.
For anyone building a PC around a
Ryzen 7000 series CPU (Zen 4), your best bet is to go with a DDR5 memory kit that supports
AMD's EXPO technology. Short for "Extended Profiles for Overclocking," you can think of it as AMD's version of XMP.
One kit that features EXPO is
G.Skill's 64GB Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000, which is on sale for
$187.99 at Amazon (save $42). It boasts a reasonably fast 6,000 MT/s data rate with timings set at CL32-38-38-96 (at 1.35V). And just a few short weeks ago, this kit was selling for $229.50.
Here are some other DDR5 kits that are on sale...