RAM News - Page 17

CES 2020 - Micron took the time at CES 2020 in the first few days of the new decade, to announce that it had started sampling next-gen DDR5 SDRAM.

The new DDR5 RAM is headed to data centers first, where it will provide a huge doubling in the data rate over previous-gen DDR4 -- all the while, DDR5 will use less power, have improved voltage margins, reduced BOM costs, and more. The new Micron DDR5 ECC DIMMs are designed for server workloads, offering up to 85% more performance over DDR4 RAM.

Micron hasn't talked about consumer DDR5 modules just yet, but both Intel and AMD have no DDR5-supported technology just yet. Intel will have DDR5 support on its new Sapphire Rapids data center CPUs in 2021, but for now -- DDR5 is but a dream for us gamers.

ADATA is about to step into a few different markets in the PC business at CES 2020, with a new 15.6-inch gaming laptop, full gaming PCs, and a new 27-inch gaming monitor.

The new ADATA XPG Photon gaming monitor uses a 27-inch IPS panel with Vivid Color Eye-Safe Display technology from PixelDisplay Inc -- the first-ever in a gaming monitor. ADATA says that this new technology will reduce eye strain for those late-night gaming sessions.

This technology eliminates blue light but does so without washing out all of the colors, using film, or using blue-blocking glasses. ADATA will provide the ability for XPG Photon gaming monitor owns to switch between the wide-color gamut during the day, and then switch over during the night.

AMD and Intel both unveiled their new HEDT processors and respective platforms, with our review on AMD's new third-gen Ryzen Threadripper 3970X right here and Intel's new Core i9-10980XE processor here. But you'll need a bunch of new RAM, right? That's where our friends at G.SKILL come in.

G.SKILL has just announced the latest in their ever-growing family of high-performance, quad-channel, ultra-capacity DDR4 RAM kits which range up to a huge 256GB for the new TRX40 and X299 motherboards. The new 256GB options come in 2666MHz, 3200MHz, and 3600MHz for AMD's new TRX40 platform while you'll be able to go up to 3800MHz and even 4000MHz with Intel and X299.

The huge 256GB kits are offered with 8 x 32GB DIMMs, but they don't have the same low latencies as the 64GB kits. You can grab yourself G.SKILL's new 256GB of DDR4 for HEDT platforms with the DDR4-3200 kit coming in at CL16-18-18-38 and 1.35V in 256GB, or the DDR4-3600 kit at CL18-22-22-42 and 1.35V.

Corsair probably surprised a lot of people today when they unveiled their new Vengeance LPX RAM kit rated to run at 5000MHz.

For those interested, as of now, the kit is listed on the Corsair webpage at $1,224.99 which is about 4.08MHz per dollar, or we can look at it conversely at $75 dollars per gigabyte of RAM. Now I say this in jest as I know the trouble a memory manufacturer goes through to tightly screen IC's and come up with enough choice units to validate these sorts of speeds.

There are some other considerations to be had as well, you are going to want to check with Corsair and closely pick through their validated board list to ensure you are pairing this sort of kit properly. When considering a uber high-speed memory kit, you must remember that there is a large amount of moving parts in play that can cause hang-ups along the way. CPU IMC quality is part of it.

G.SKILL today announced its new 32GB single DIMMs or memory modules. The new 32GB DIMMs allow for much higher memory density for your PC and more overhead for heavy task loading. As games and photoshop, along with other conventional usage models, increase, the need for more memory starts to become apparent. Let us not even get into the realm of Google chrome, and the fact that you would probably never need to close a tab ever again.

G.SKILL, however, is not merely releasing some low-speed kits to appease the masses; as you can see from the chart above, they have kits ranging up to 256GB at 3200MHz and up to 4000MHz at 128GB. This needless to say is insane speed but is possible with the right platform and some luck in your IMC. These new kits up to 4 DIMMs can be applicable for Ryzen 3000 platforms, but do be aware that with the extra stress of higher density DIMMs, some tuning may be required if your IMC is not playing nice with them. Also, we all know that Threadripper 3000 is coming soon, and so the kits you see demonstrated on X299 at up to 256GB will likely slot right over to working on the new better memory controller packaged on all Zen 2 chips thus far.

The G.SKILL supplied shot shows a Ryzen 9 3900X with a two-stick kit on an X570 Godlike from MSI. The board is running at full DDR4 3800 with 1:1 FCLK at 64GB (2x32GB) with CL18 and command rate 1. This in itself is impressive, and of course, YMMV, but with what we have seen on Ryzen 3000 up to now, this could be an easy feat to pull off.

G.SKILL has been pushing the limits with memory for a long time now. With Ryzen, the memory frequency and related performance have always been a bit limited.

With AMD's Ryzen 3000 series, the memory speed has been unlocked in a significant way. G.SKILL has released a kit with 3800MHz speed and CL14-16-16-36 in a 16GB kit.

Tested on an MSI X570 Godlike, we can see the sticks running at their full potential achieving AIDA64 bandwidth numbers of 56-58GB/s, respectively. This is accomplished by G.SKILL testing the limitation of the Ryzen 3000 platform and finding where the Infinity Fabric (FCLK) and memory speed can run 1:1 with full stability. Officially, AMD states that past 3600-3733 the boards will drop from 1:1 to 1:2. This means the FCLK runs at half of your memory speed, which can severely impact performance or at the very least, inducing a latency penalty.

We kinda knew it was coming but now it is here: DRAM prices have spiked by 20% from the Toshiba factory power outages and also fueled by the on-going trade issues between Japan and South Korea.

This will cause the price of DRAM used in most consumer PCs in the form of RAM, graphce cards, RAM for smartphones and much more will slowly increase. It'll happen as stock is depleted, and then some of it will be marked up along the supply chain before it gets into your hands. The tightly knit memory industry is co-dependant on one another, with Asia being a hotspot for DRAM with South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. DRAMeXchange reports that the spot-pricing of 8-gigabit DDR4 is up 14.6% week-over-week, and up a large 23% as of July 5.

Japan is flexing its muscles with regulatory moves, but industry sources have said that if the regulatory moves affect production of DRAM at Samsung Eletronics and SK Hynix -- two South Korean chip titans -- "memory prices could skyrocket".

Computex 2019 - Where do I even begin with ADATA, as it really felt like 'alright this has to be it' when I'm being walked around their gigantic booth in the halls of Nangang... but it kept going. Quality product to quality product, most blinged out with RGBs and an amazing gaming pod that I need want to take home.

Gaming on a super-ultra-wide gaming monitor, in a game that ADATA reached out to the developer for to get their pod into the game so it felt more lifelike. The gaming desk is adjustable once you get into the pod, and pushes up closer to the screen when not needed. If that pod had been moving with the pod in the game, I would not have gotten any other work done as I would've planted myself there for the entire day.

As you can see a gaming RIG is secured at the back of the gaming pod, blinged out with some ADATA RGB-infused cooling and DDR4 RAM.

Computex 2019 - Another visit in the Grand Hyatt this year was Kingston who alongside its HyperX brand were both showing off some great new products, and some much more bling than others.

First we'll start with the the DC1000M, a new PCIe NVMe Gen 3x4 2.5-inch SSD that comes in a U.2 interface and capacities between 960GB and 7.68TB. Kingston is also offering hardware-based power fail protection on the DC1000M series SSDs, too.

Kingston was also showing off its A2000 series, which is a PCIe NVMe Gen 3x4 M.2 SSD that arrives with up to 1TB of flash, and is powered by Intel's 3D TLC 64-layer NAND flash. Kingston is promising up to 1500MB/sec write and 2000MB/sec read speeds.

ADATA has just smashed the previous DDR4 speed record by Kingston and its HyperX Predator RAM, with ADATA's in-house XPG Overclocking Lab (XOCL) using its new Spectrix D60G DDR4 RGB RAM to reach the dizzying heights of 5634.1MHz.

A single 8GB stick of Spectrix D60G was used on an MSI MPG X390I Gaming Edge AC Mini-ITX motherboard and an Intel Core i9-9900K, with LN2 cooling keeping the highly-overclocked DDR4 RAM cool. The timings were loose, with the team stretching them out to CL 31-31-31-46 3T, with no voltage numbers released but with LN2 keeping the RAM cool as well as having the DDR4 chips clocked at that speed, I'd say it was pretty damn high.

The ADATA Spectrix D60G comes at a stock 4133MHz so the OC all the way to 5634MHz is mighty impressive, and using LN2 cooling is even more insane. The RAM overclocking game is a crazy one, with ADATA taking the reigns this close to Computex 2019 is a big deal.