DDR5 Memory Prices Are Finally Moving In The Right Direction

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you RAM is cheap again. It may never again be as cheap as it was nine months ago. Prices absolutely are trending the right way, though, likely impacted by a few different factors. Everyone's realized that OpenAI is not in fact going to buy 40% of the global DRAM supply as it once intended, and both Google and NVIDIA have released technologies that radically reduce the required RAM to run big AI workloads.

Given all that, it's no surprise that RAM has started to come down. These prices aren't barnburners, but if you need some RAM, they're as good as it has been in a fair while.

Starting right off with two 32-gigabyte kits we have Corsair's Vengeance RGB at 6400 MT/s. This kit has a relatively reasonable price and RGB LED lighting. We'd recommend manually tuning timings to try and improve the loose sub-timings, but you gotta take what you can get in this trying time.

The TEAMGROUP T-Force Vulcan kit has a lower transfer rate and higher CAS latency, but the sub-timings are considerably tighter than on the Corsair kit. This might be a better choice for AMD Ryzen users who aren't confident their chip will play nice with a 6400 MT/s transfer rate.

Next up we have a couple of 64GB kits. They're not cheap, but they are a whole lotta RAM. That Patriot kit has some pretty decent performance specs for what it is, and while the Corsair isn't super-fast, if you really need the capacity, the speed doesn't matter that much. It's actually the cheapest kit in this post, per-gigabyte.

Lastly, we have a few selections of slightly higher-performance memory. The KLEVV CRAS V kit boasts RGB LED lighting and a very solid 10ns first-word latency; this is the kit most buyers should be looking at if they want top-shelf gaming performance on AMD machines.

On the other hand, the Biwin Black Opal, while pricey, is probably the best RAM deal in this post; not only is it a solid capacity at 48GB, but it boasts the tightest timings of the bunch, too. We reviewed this exact kit not long ago, and it offers awesome out-of-the-box performance, no tuning needed. It's the perfect pairing for a new AMD CPU, like one of the upcoming Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition chips.

As far as selections for Intel CPUs go, well, the optimum choice is 7200 MT/s or faster, and frankly, there's nothing with those specs at a price below "gobsmacking" just yet. Any of these memory kits will work in an Intel platform, it's just that you won't be getting the best possible performance. If you see a nicely priced hot-clocked RAM kit, let us know in the comments below!