It certainly has a been a minute since we last looked at the state of the Random Access Memory market. When we last took a peek, DDR5 was the new kid on the block. Only Intel was (partially) supporting it via their latest 12th generation IMC baked into their Core-I CPUS, and AMD was on the sidelines going ‘maybe next generation’. Since then Intel has continued to support DDR4 but DDR5 is much, much more optimal a choice for their 13th generation Core-I CPUs, and AMD has gone all in with only DDR5 support for their latest and greatest. This biggest change however is the price of DDR5. Bluntly stated, DDR5 has gotten much more reasonable with Crucial’s DDR5-4800 dropping by nearly half to $126 for 2x16GB kit! Furthermore, today’s review kit of their DDR5-5200 only costs an extra $17(USD) at a very reasonable $143… or about the same as what many DDR4-4000 2x16GB kits now cost.
Let us say that again. DDR5 no longer comes with a major cost penalty. Instead it is only rock-bottom, “value oriented” DD4 kits that will save buyers a noticeable amount of money. Make no mistake. Crucial is not the only one who has massively cut prices and made the arguably unreasonable… reasonable. They ‘simply’ are the ones who have pushed the market prices down… down… down. Furthermore, they have done so without cutting corners. The DDR5-5200 2x16GB kit uses the same single sided configuration as both their DDR5-4800 kits and their DDR5-5600 kits. The same Micron RAM ICs. The same, albeit with a few tweaks, on-board voltage controller and power delivery sub-system. The same industry leading factory testing. The same lifetime warranty. The only changes have to do with the timings to the cream of the crop RAM ICs Micron skims off the top to install into their own Crucial branded products. To be precise instead of 40-39-39 at 1.1v (DDR5-4800 kits) Crucial uses 42-42-42 (@1.1v) timings for their DDR5-5200 offerings.
In this review we will not only go over the pros and cons of using a faster kit with lax timings versus a ‘slower’ kit at tighter timings. We will also not only tell but show what impact this has and offering our opinion on whether or not it makes sense to save a few bucks… and if the DDR5-5200 kit is as good a value today as the DDR5-4800 Crucial kit was back in the Intel 12th gen Core-I days.
