Gigabyte And V-Color Team Up On First DDR5 Memory With An OLED Display
Up until now, the hyper-focused mantra by hardware makers has been to 'RGB all the things!', and they've been doing exactly that. They're still doing it, of course, but they're also pivoting to putting built-in displays on all the things, like case side panels (looking at you, ASRock), motorized standing desks (hello, Lian Li), mini PCs (hi there, Miniproca), and now for the first time, DDR5 memory kits. Yes, really.
Gigabyte and V-Color are teaming up on what they're pitching as a a "groundbreaking" endeavor, with V-Color's new XFinity+ DDR5 modules sporting an OLED module delivering real-time monitoring stats.
"Designed for overclocking enthusiasts and hardware lovers, XFinity+ is the result of a close collaboration with the Gigabyte engineering team. It introduces a built-in real-time monitoring display directly on the memory module 'no additional connectors or cables required'. This display communicates with the motherboard in real time and directly reads system data," V-Color states in a press release.
You can configure the memory's OLED to display a number of vitals, such as memory capacity, speed, timings, voltage, or temperature. It can also simply display AMD Expo or Intel XMP, presumably to let you know if a memory profile is active.
V-Color claims it has a patent on the technology, which can display any of those vitals in real-time during the POST sequence without any help from the operating system. And yes, RGB lighting is on board too.
The kits are not out yet, but V-Color is planning to release nearly a dozen options spanning 32GB, 48GB, and 64GB memory kits. They include the following...
V-Color confirms that just one module in each kit will sport a built-in OLED display. That's a wise move, both from a cost perspective, and because you wouldn't be able to see the display on every module anyway, only the outer most one. Even then, it depends on your setup.
The question is, do we really need an OLED panel on our memory modules? No, of course not, just like we don't need RGB lighting. Will there be a market for it? We suspect there will be, though pricing will obviously play a key role.
We'll have to wait a little bit longer to find how much these kits will go for at retail. V-Color says it plans on mass producing its Xfinity+ DDR5 with built-in OLED starting in Q3 2025, which we assume to mean this month (Q4 starts in October). Initially, the kits will be available at Newegg, then launched to retail more broadly, including listings on Amazon.
