recommended ram speed for DDR5

hananel dahan · June 6, 2023

I'm corently planning a new rig, and one of the things i have problem to choose is Ram. i see tons of options i do have limited budget but im looking for good speed (sweet spot) for ddr5 kit. I'm aiming twords 32 gigs, but this is where i found the tricky part: what latency and what mhz speed is good for gaming? ty for your help answering this and i don't like rgb.

have a nice day you all

RONOTHAN## · June 6, 2023

Depends on the platform that you're going for. If it's AM5, currently anything faster than 6000 requires a fair bit of effort and luck to get working, so going for 6000 at CL32-38-38 or CL30-40-40 timings is usually your best bet. If it's 12th gen Intel, it depends a bit on the board. With the 2 DIMM boards, 6400 is pretty reliable to work easily and not that expensive, while on most of the 4 DIMM boards 6000 is the fastest I'd trust to work reliably. With 13th gen, it's even more complicated as the board plays a huge role in getting it to work. On any 4 DIMM board, 6400 with 2x16GB kits should reliably work, so that would be my pick with a decent set of timings (32-39-39 is pretty common), but speeds of over 7600 can work pretty reliably depending on a bunch of factors and still give a good performance uplift.

One thing to note though is that any 6000 CL32 or 30 rated kit will be able to do at least DDR5 7000 with a bit of tuning, so if you're willing to put in a bit of effort to get some settings to work, you can usually save a fair bit of money by going for a cheaper kit instead. Heck, if you're in the US and want to go that route, this kit is $73 and should 100% be able to do 7000, and by most reports I've seen should be capable of 8000+ with a good motherboard and CPU.

TL;DR: 6000 CL32 or CL30 is probably fine, though you might be able to use a faster XMP depending on your setup or just overclock your way to those settings with the aforementioned 6000 rated kit.