 Did you ever suddenly wake up and realize, holy smokes, that thing that felt like yesterday was seven years ago? That's DDR4. I know, right? 2014, this stuff came out. See you later, because there's a new kid in town. DDR5 desktop platforms are right around the corner, and it's time to meet the fifth generation memory technology that's gonna be juicing up our speeds and our capacities for at least the next few years, starting with a physical look at what's different, followed by a deeper dive into what makes this new breed of RAM stand out. Just like our sponsor, GlassWire, stands out. Keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your PC, even when you aren't using it with GlassWire. If a strange device joins your Wi-Fi, you'll be notified instantly. Get 25% off using code Linus at the link below. ["Dance Dance Revolution!" plays over music and video game sounds.] ["Dance Dance Revolution!" plays over music and video game sounds.] This is it. My first hands-on with a full retail kit of DDR5 memory. On the surface, it really doesn't look very different. In fact, it even has the same 288 pins as DDR4 memory. But don't imagine that you're gonna be fitting it into the same slot. The key has been moved to prevent any but the most determined users from managing to mix up their memory generations, and for good reason. One of the biggest changes from DDR4 is immediately visible on our bare board here. Look at this. The Power Management Integrated Circuit, or PMIC, has been moved from the motherboard to the memory module itself. Now the PMIC's role is to take one of the standard output voltages from your computer power supply, in this case, five volts, and convert it to the lower 1.1 volts that are required by the DDR5 chips here on the module. This move was absolutely key to making the signal integrity improvements that were required to ramp DDR5 up to speeds 50% higher than last gen, and even beyond if this alleged leak roadmap is to be believed. One curious side effect of this though, is that even though DDR5 runs at nearly 10% lower voltages than DDR4, which should lower power draw, the onboard PMIC is not gonna operate at 100% efficiency, meaning that we could actually end up needing to deal with a small amount of waste heat on each module. G-Skill assures me though, that it's unlikely we'll see a return to those clip-on RAM fans from the DDR2 days. Those things really suck. They were loud and the fans failed all the time. Another side effect of moving the PMIC on module is that it adds cost to the individual modules. So once you also account for the more complicated PCB design and the early adopter tax, you can expect DDR5 modules to be significantly more expensive than DDR4 modules of the same capacity. Now in theory, some of this cost should be offset by removing power management from the motherboard. But I've only rarely seen motherboards get cheaper from one generation to the next. And in light of the ongoing worldwide semiconductor shortage, not to mention the inclusion of PCI express gen five on these upcoming platforms, which has its own costly trace routing challenges, I will be pretty surprised if it happens this time. The good news though, is DDR5 comes with some pretty spectacular benefits that aren't immediately obvious on a spec sheet. Like I'd forgive you for looking at the launch JDEC DDR5 frequency of 4,800 megatransfers per second and thinking, wow, that sounds pretty unexceptional compared to something like this G skill kit on Newegg that's rated at a blistering 5,300 megatransfers per second, especially considering that cast latency or the number of RAM cycles to fulfill a data request is expected to be in the neighborhood of double compared to last gen. But here's the thing, remember that video we did recently explaining how frequency alone doesn't paint the full picture of performance? Well, for one thing, the memory controller in your DDR4 compatible CPU, it wasn't designed with these kinds of speeds in mind. So as with any form of overclocking, it's a bit of a crap shoot whether it'll even work with super fast modules like those ones. And for another past a certain point, there are actually internal bottlenecks on the memory ICs. That's the chips on the module that would prevent them from properly taking advantage of any additional speed anyway. This part's a little complicated, but bear with me. Internally, each IC has these two dimensional grids of bits, you know, zeros and ones, and they're called banks. These banks get bundled into bank groups. And to explain it simply, whenever a bank group fires off the data requested by the CPU, that bank group needs a little bit of time to recover. During that time, the other bank groups fire one after the other to fill up a burst buffer. You can think of it kind of like a mini gun, where each barrel is a bank group and the bullets are data bits firing into the buffer. Except what happens if the module is running at such a high speed that we roll back around to our first bank group before it's recovered? That's a problem. That could be the bottleneck. So to solve it, DDR5 doubles the number of bank groups from four to eight. That gives each bank group way more time to cool down and pretty much guarantees that we'll be able to properly take advantage of speeds well beyond the 6,000 or so mega transfers per second of first generation OC kits like this Triton Z5 here. And it gets even more interesting if you're into this sort of thing, which you obviously are because you've made it this far. The thing is, while the mini gun analogy helps us to understand bank group cool downs, in the real world, it would be terribly inefficient to transfer ones and zeros to the CPU individually. So instead, let's imagine that our mini gun is shooting all of these bits into an intermediary buffer called the burst buffer. And we can think of this kind of like firing a single shotgun shell full of bits over to the CPU all at once. A bit more impactful, right? Now, DDR4 modules are linked to the CPU with a single 64-bit bus or communication channel, and they have a burst length of eight. So we could say that our fully automatic DDR4 shotgun here fires 64 pellet rounds with an eight round magazine. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! So 64 bits times eight rounds gives us a total of 64 bytes of data per burst before it needs to be reloaded by our bank groups. Follow so far? Good. DDR5 modules change this up in a big way. Instead of that single 64-bit bus, we actually have two 32-bit sub channels that can operate independently. So back to our shotgun here. We fire smaller shells with only 32 bits each, but we double our burst length or our magazine capacity to 16 per burst. So if we math it up here again, 32 bits times a burst length of 16, that is 64 bytes per burst, just like DDR4. Except now, we've got two barrels that can fire independently each with its own 16 round magazine, but don't get carried away. This isn't dual channel, and you don't get to just add that total theoretical capacity together. To boost your memory bandwidth, you're still going to want to run multiple DDR5 modules in dual channel mode or more channels in the workstation and server space. The real benefit of these independent sub channels is efficiency and latency. In DDR4, if you only have 32 bits of data in the burst buffer, you just have to fill the rest with junk before you ship it out to the CPU. That takes time, and it means that the CPU has to wait around. Well, now you don't have to wait. You can just send 32 bits if that's all that's needed right now, and the CPU won't have to wait around. And there's more. DDR5 ICs, so again, that's the individual memory chips themselves, now contain a basic form of ECC or error correction that operates completely transparently to the end user. It can't be disabled, and it serves to improve stability during high speed data storage and transfers within the IC. Honestly, this was way overdue in my opinion, but I'm still grateful we're finally getting it, especially considering that unregistered DDR5 DIMMs, you know, the kind that just goes in your regular desktop computer, are expected to hit capacities of 128 gigabytes. On a single stick. And load reduced DIMMs are potentially able to go as high as four terabytes per module with a combination of improved density and die stacking in the coming years. But let's slow down for a second. In spite of its benefits, DDR5 isn't some kind of magic silver bullet either. And at the same frequency, let's say 4,800 megatransfer per second, overclock spec DDR4 is actually expected to outperform this base spec DDR5. Well, no problem you might think. You'll just wanna overclock the snot out of your DDR5 and go faster, right? Might not be quite that simple. Remember the on module power management IC? Well, as it turns out, there are two different types of them. One is not designed to go higher than the default of 1.1 to about 1.435 volts. The other kind, which has to be specifically built onto your module at the time of construction, is a programmable mode one that can go as high as, well, there doesn't seem to be a set limit for that one. So expect to see some pretty exotic modules down the line and some pretty exotic cooling on them. Truthfully, even the non-OC modules should end up being pretty interesting since DDR5 is also getting an SPD or speed chip facelift. Instead of just storing default frequency and latency values, which is usually gonna contain both a stock and an overclocked or XMP setting, it now also handles signaling to the power management IC and to any other microcontrollers on the module, like RGB lighting controllers. So I'm expecting that to directly result in more creative lighting implementations than we've ever seen before. And Lord knows that is what the industry needs. More RGB. I saved the best for last, see? Just like I saved our sponsor for last. Thanks to Micro Center for sponsoring this video. Micro Center has partnered with Asus to create a new easy to use online PC building tool that helps customers build their own computer with three different base starting points, value, performance, or ultimate. Each base system will include a case with a pre-installed motherboard, power supply, and separately packaged graphics card. You then add your choice of CPU between AMD and Intel, as well as your choice of RAM, storage, and operating system. The parts can be arranged for same day in-store pickup, or for an added build fee, Micro Center will assemble the computer for you. If you're unsure of what parts you need, Micro Center's expert technicians can walk you through selecting your components. So don't wait. Check out Micro Center's new PC builder and get a free 240 gig SSD if you're a new customer at the links down below. If you're looking for another video to watch, maybe check out our most recent look into how memory speed impacts performance, particularly in gaming.