 DDR4 memory. It's fast, it's power efficient, it's a requirement if you want to pick up a fancy new CPU that needs it, and you can learn all about it here. So with DDR4 available, why would you want DDR3 anymore? On top of all the other stuff that I just said, DDR4 has four in it. That's like one more than DDR3. The answer is cost. At the time of making this video, DDR4 is more expensive for a given capacity than DDR3. So for that reason, many potential customers will want to see it justify its higher cost. So welcome to our apples to apples comparison of DDR3 and DDR4. Cooler Master V-series semi-modular power supplies feature 80 plus gold efficiency and their gold guarantee 5-year warranty. Click now to learn more. So let's introduce our test platform, shall we? There are no CPUs on the market that support both DDR3 and DDR4, at least consumer ones. So we have to be pretty careful to reduce variables and make this comparison as fair as possible. It starts with the processor. So we chose two CPUs based on the same Haswell microarchitecture from Intel, the Core i7-4790K and the Core i7-5820K. Then we proceeded to disable two of the cores on the 5820K and clock them both at straight 4.4 gigahertz with no turbo boost. So neither of them works with the processor. So we chose two CPUs based on the same Haswell microarchitecture from Intel, the Core i7-4790K and clock them both at straight 4.4 gigahertz with no turbo boost. So neither of them would have any raw clock speed advantage. One thing we couldn't do anything about is the difference in cache size, but this is as close as we could get to a level playing field for the CPU. Next up is motherboards. We've got two gigabyte gaming 5 motherboards, the Z97X Gaming 5 and the X99 Gaming 5. We were looking for feature equivalent boards to use for both chips and both of these have a very similar loadout with SATA Express, 10 gigabit M.2 drive support, amplified onboard audio, Qualcomm Killer networking, similar CPU power designs with gigabytes all digital implementation, and of course a sexy matte black and red color scheme that I find myself caring about probably far too much. The X99 version does have some extras to go along with its higher price, a more advanced sound processor, 3 and 4-way SLI support, and some LED lighting accents including on the heatsink and the I.O. shield to make it easier to plug things in in the dark. But enough about that, you guys want to know about the memory we're using, right? Representing DDR3 at up to the highest JDek speed, 2133 MHz with enhanced timings, we've got a 16 gig dual channel kit of XPG V1 memory, resplendent in an anodized red finish. And representing DDR4 at up to the highest JDek DDR4 speed, 2400 MHz, although higher speeds will be coming, a 16 gig quad channel kit of ADATA's new DDR4 XPG Z1 series with an updated aggressive looking heat spreader, also featuring an anodized red finish. So huge thanks to ADATA for providing us with these modules for testing. Even the brand new DDR4 modules operated flawlessly throughout the benchmarking process, and for that matter, so did the motherboards. I'm really impressed, especially with the X99 Gaming 5. This one has made a lot of progress. Gigabytes drop in BIOS updates like that, and the stability of it is much, much improved over X99 at launch, so yeah, everything just kind of went smoothly for a change. Anyway, speaking of the benchmarking process, I guess that's what's next. So I'm going to show you three different scenarios here. First is DDR3 dual channel. Next is DDR4 dual channel. So we have a very direct apples to apples comparison between the two memory technologies at a variety of speeds and timings. And finally, to show a very best case scenario for modern DDR4, I threw in a set of results with the RAM overclocked to 3 GHz in quad channel mode, the configuration that most folks running DDR4 capable processors will be running until Broadwell comes to the mainstream desktop in dual channel only sometime next year. Now synthetic benchmarks are where DDR4 should be able to really flex its muscles. These AIDA64 benches are designed to show us the uppermost limits of the theoretical performance of the memory subsystem of a PC. In our apples to apples test, DDR4 delivers better performance in reads than DDR3, but actually worse write and latency results, making this a bit of a wash. But in its full quad channel configuration, our high speed DDR4 is untouchable here. Next up is real world non-gaming results. Multi-threaded rendering in our 7-zip compression and decompression benchmarks are a good way to show off the performance of modern CPUs with lots of processing cores. And high speed memory is needed to keep all of those cores fed. So something to note here is that while the performance scaling with better memory might not look very impressive, the LGA20113 socket is likely to be with us for a few years and has CPUs available for it already with up to 18 cores. So while the extra bandwidth, even in quad channel, isn't needed for this artificial quad core that we created here, there are ways to kit out a board like this so that it's much more likely that that extra memory bandwidth would be used. Which leads to our final set of benchmarks, games. I only ended up running a couple of games, the canned benchmark in Tomb Raider at these settings, and my custom run at the end of Bioshock Infinite at these settings, because the results here don't leave much for me to interpret. Even going all the way down to DDR3 1333 MHz, so nearly the launch speed of DDR3, in dual channel, I couldn't create a situation where game performance was limited in any meaningful way by the memory subsystem on a Haswell-based CPU with only four cores. So in conclusion, while it might be worthwhile from a platform point of view to invest in DDR4 for your 6-core or 8-core processor, since you don't really have a choice if you want the latest CPUs, if you're a normal consumer who doesn't really need the extra cores, it looks like LGA 1150 with its ancient DDR3 memory still has a lot of life left in it, and given how unconstrained our Haswell CPUs are, even by very low-speed DDR3, I think it's safe to say that the performance improvements we can expect to see from Intel's upcoming Broadwell desktop processors will be thanks to architectural improvements, not the use of DDR4. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know what you thought. Were you expecting DDR4 in an apples-to-apples comparison to run away with it, or were you expecting exactly the results you saw today? Check out the link in the video description if you want to support us, it says support us, you click that link, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, you can give us a monthly contribution, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy toothbrushes or whatever it is you buy on Amazon. Thanks for watching again guys, and as always, don't forget to subscribe for more videos just like this one.