 So you've come looking for DDR5. I'll cut you a deal. Only double retail pricing. It's a steal. For me, that is. Scalpers have taken the fledgling DDR5 market hostage. Look around you. Everything on Newegg is out of stock right now and low-end 16 gig modules of DDR5 are being sold for as much as 32 gigs of Trident Z is supposed to be. Meanwhile on eBay, you're looking at anywhere from 700 to a thousand dollars for a 32 gig kit of the good stuff. We're in a bad place right now. But there's a light. A light of justice! Because the fact that DDR5 is newer, shinier, doesn't mean that you need to buy it. Unlike our sponsor, GlassWire lets you see past and present network activity, detect malware on your PC or Android device, and block its connections to prevent things from getting worse. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link down below. I know, I know. We did a whole video about why DDR5 is super cool. And it really is. But it's got a lot working against it right now, too. You've got first-gen RAM chips interfacing with first-gen memory controllers over imperfectly optimized first-gen trace layouts. And it's perfectly natural to expect all this first-gen-ery to take a while to reach its full potential. I mean, think about how the first PlayStation 2 games ended up looking worse than the last PlayStation 1 games because developers had no idea yet how to unlock the full potential of the emotion engine. And even in the computer memory space, this is nothing new. DDR2, DDR3, DDR4. If you look at contemporaneous reviews, you'll find a lot of reports saying that there is no practical benefit to the upgrade, and that it is certainly not worth the early adopter tax. Like look at this dork back in 2014. The synthetic benchmark graphs show DDR4 absolutely wiping the floor with DDR3 in raw bandwidth. But when we look at the numbers in real-world applications, even this relatively low spec kit of DDR3 beats out the fastest DDR4 that was available at the time. Of course, as we all know, DDR4, like its predecessors, ended up getting the last laugh with mid-generation refinements that led to much higher performance at ultimately lower costs. I mean, the hot item back when that video was shot was 3000 mega transfers per second, CL16. Nowadays, we would call that budget at best, cheapo at worst, and the same thing will eventually happen with DDR5. Just not today. Unlike our new water bottles. Those are already proven superior, and you can get them right now. No scalping required, lttstore.com. To illustrate our point, we ran a bevy of benchmarks using our Core i9-12900K paired with an RTX 3090. This is admittedly a very high spec machine that not everyone will be using, but it allows both of our memory technologies to put their best foot forward by removing system bottlenecks elsewhere. For DDR5, we've included both the highest currently available JNX speed and a 5200 mega transfer per second kit, which was the fastest that our system could handle reliably, and then we've included a handful of common DDR4 configurations. Kicking things off, our high-end DDR5 pulls off a respectable 5% lead over our fastest DDR4 kit in F1 2021. Though it should be noted that we're having issues running more than two sticks of this stuff at a time right now, and the other problem is that our lower-end DDR5 kit drops off significantly from its bigger brother. In fact, while the average FPS drop looks fine, it trails even our top spec DDR4 by as much as 10% in minimum frame times. And that could easily manifest as little hitches or stutters in your gameplay. Forza is a little bit kinder to our DDR5, but the improvement offered by the high-end kit is negligible, and the benefit over DDR4 is under 5% in both cases. Flight Simulator's CPU-intensive nature seems like it should be a good fit for DDR5, but no, both kits are actually consistently between 1 and 4% slower than our fast DDR4 kit. That's surprising, but not as surprising as CSGO, another game that's CPU heavy. While the high-end kit stays roughly equivalent with a few frames gained or lost depending on the metric, our lower-end kit is on par or worse than DDR4 running 400 mega transfers per second lower. Civ 6 for its part was more or less the same regardless, with less than half a second separating our DDR5 from our fastest DDR4. Taken together then, the gaming tests averaged out to about a 2% win for the high-end kit, and a 2% loss for the low-end kit compared to high-end DDR4, which, and I cannot emphasize this enough, costs less than half as much at retail, and that is pre-Scalper markup. Perhaps productivity will produce DDR5's proper performance potential. Cinebench sure doesn't think so. It's a total wash with a measly 1% difference or less between our fastest DDR4 and DDR5 kits. Compiling Firefox though gives DDR5 its first major win, with even the lower-end kit picking up a 6% faster time compared to our best DDR4, and the higher-end kit being nearly a minute faster. Code compilation does hit system memory pretty hard though, so this isn't a huge surprise. It's just nice to see a W for it somewhere. Blender, meanwhile, doesn't seem to give TwoHoot's what kind of memory you have, as long as it's lots, and PugetBench is an interesting case because every Adobe app tested here gets a performance uplift, but none of them are as stark as Photoshop. Even our low-end DDR5 kit is 14% faster than our high-end DDR4 kit, and that's saying a lot. Though this again makes sense because of Photoshop's memory-intensive layer and effects operations, where the GPU isn't really doing a lot of the work. Finally, we've got spec workstation, where some ridiculously memory-intensive tests come into play, giving us substantial 20 and even 30% performance uplifts in the product development, life sciences, and energy suites. So that's stuff like CAD, medical imaging, and geological surveys, where there is a lot of data being thrown around. Financial services and general operations, meanwhile, not so hot, which we'd expect considering the lighter nature of that work and our previous results. Overall, then, productivity nets us a rather significant but kind of inconsistent 5% to 7% bump in performance with DDR5 compared to the fastest DDR4. So this is one area where, depending on what you do, DDR5 might be worth the investment, although I gotta say, that better be some pretty important work you're doing. To be clear, none of what we're saying is that DDR5 has no advantages for average gamers. It's more power-efficient for one, and the nature of its more numerous but smaller burst buffers means that architectures that rely on responsive memory like Ryzen may find more benefit even at these early speeds, despite the looser timings compared to DDR4. But since a DDR5 Ryzen platform doesn't exist yet, and by the time it does, both motherboard manufacturers and memory manufacturers might have a better idea of how to optimize their implementations, I think it's safe to say that you shouldn't be paying a premium for it today, leading us to the big question we need to answer here. Why are scalpers scalping it then? Well, I think there's a big emotional component. People like having the latest and greatest thing, and I think that we in the media need to accept at least part of the blame for that. But there's another angle to it, and that's motherboard manufacturers. All of the highest-end, shiniest, most appealing motherboards are DDR5 only, and now that there's a shortage of it, it's not just as simple for them as plonking down some DDR4 slots in place of the DDR5 ones to improve consumer options. Trace layouts and lengths, topology, and of course, the fact that the power management I see is on each DDR5 module rather than built into the board means that there's a non-trivial amount of work involved with retooling a board for DDR4. The good news for you today is that most of the highest-end motherboards don't really do a lot to justify the extra spend, at least if you're not overclocking with liquid nitrogen. As we've seen in our previous motherboard investigation, down-to-earth gaming motherboards like Asus' ROG Strix or MSI's Tomahawk series are going to give you performance and features very close to the bleeding edge. And if you really must have high-end, Gigabyte actually has gone to the effort of remaking nearly their entire lineup in DDR4 flavors, leaving only the cream of the crop out of reach. We're gonna have some links to these down below if you're looking to build a 12th-gen rig. For today, though, the solution is to hoist a great big middle finger to scalpers by buying DDR4 while it's still relevant. Hopefully, by the time you don't want it anymore, the scalpers will have moved on to greener pastures. Maybe some game console they can buy or something. Actually, please don't do that. Game consoles are one of the only ways people can get a reasonably-priced gaming rig right now. Thanks, Brilliant, for sponsoring today's video. Brilliant teaches you by solving puzzles and problems on their website and app. They've got over 60 interactive courses in math, science, and computer science, and Brilliant is just a great website to help you achieve your goals in STEM. Their courses are designed to puzzle and surprise you, and one that probably all of you will like is Mathematical Fundamentals. Is it possible to drag the number tiles so that every row and column adds up to the target sum beside it? Find out by giving it a try today. Just go to brilliant.org slash LinusTechTips.com slash LinusTechTips to find out. The first 200 of you to click on the link will get 20% off today. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our previous video on DDR5 for more info on the inner workings and just how it differs from DDR4. I promise it is super interesting even if you can't or at least shouldn't buy it right now.