RAM News - Page 1

The DRAM market is about to get hairy, with Chinese manufacturer Xi'an UnilC Semiconductors making its first DDR4 memory that is 100% made in China.

The 100% made in China part is interesting, as UnilC is using made-in-China parts from start to finish: all DRAM chips, PCB, drivers, and other required parts. It's a plain-looking stick of DDR4, with no RGB lighting or even a heatspreader -- but this is day one of making made-in-China DDR4 memory.

We have unbuffered DDR4-2400 and DDR4-2667 modules being made by UnilC in 8GB sticks. As for timings, we're looking at the DDR4-2400 module is timed at CL17 17-17-39, and the DDR4-2667 at CL18. Both of the modules use 1.2V. We're not going to see China take over the DDR4 market overnight, but this is a very big step in that direction.

ADATA has been making high-performance DRAM and NAND flash products along with other accessories for a long time. The company has announced that its XPG Overclocking Lab, in conjunction with MSI, has been able to overclock its Spectrix D50 and D60G 32 GB RGB DDR4 memory modules to a frequency of 5000 MHz on an Intel Z490 platform. ADATA says that feat not only shows its modules compatibility with the latest Intel platform to bring out the module's full performance potential but also its stability.

ADATA D60G DRAM has more RGB lighting per mm2 than other memory modules available. That means that more than 60% of the surface area of the module is covered. The RAM also had fully exposed light diffusers that are extra-wide for maximum effect.

XPG Spectrix D50 RAM has a "clean and elegant exterior" with simple geometric lines and a triangular RGB panel that fits with the overall design of the module. These modules have three RGB modes, including static, breathing, and comet. They can also be set to give a light show synchronized to music. Both the D60 and D50 modules are built with high-quality chips and metal heat sink for signal integrity, reliability, and stability.

Antec has just unveiled its new Katana DDR4 memory, which the company designed with the inspiration of a Japanese Samurai sword and its blade.

The new Antec Katana DDR4 memory has a slick style with some not-so-over-the-top RGB lighting at the top, with Eric Chen, the Vice President of Antec, explaining: "With our Katana memory modules, Antec aims at enthusiasts buying their stylish gaming cases and looking to add stylish designed components by the same brand".

Chen continues: "Katana shows off a metallic shine on the silver lighting bar, while, lit up, Katana glows with soft and harmonious light effects". Antec took home a 2019 iF DESIGN AWARD for its design on the Katana DDR4 RAM. You will have RGB lighting control of the Antec Katana DDR4 memory with ASUS Aura Sync, MSI Mystic Light, and ASRock Polychrome Sync.

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.

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.

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".