// PC GAMER — GAMING
With the RAMpocalypse set to rage for years, memory kit makers are responding in one of two ways: Do nothing or go hell-for-leather
Neither response is what the PC industry needs right now.
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Unless you've been living on another planet, orbiting a star light years away, you won't have missed the fact that memory kits are painfully expensive right now. One of the world's biggest manufacturers of PCs has warned that the RAMpocalypse will continue for years, but so far, makers of DRAM kits have taken a somewhat binary approach in their responses to the crisis: do nothing or go extreme.
As reported by Computerbase, a forecast on the supply and prices of DRAM was presented by Lenovo at a high-performance computing event last week. It essentially told us something that we're already acutely aware of: Memory prices will remain extremely high for many years to come and may never drop back down to 2024 levels.
There's nothing that you and I can do about this, of course, but you'd perhaps expect the top manufacturers of memory kits to do something. We don't really need high-speed, low-latency sets of DRAM in our gaming PCs to enjoy decent frame rates, and anyone with an AMD Ryzen X3D chip can get away with surprisingly slow memory.
Yes, the 'sweet spot' for an AM5 socket chip is DDR5-6000 and anything with a CAS latency of 32 cycles or lower will feel really snappy and responsive. But slap a set of DDR5-5200 CL38 in there, and you won't actually notice unless the game is 100% memory-limited. There are some genuine scenarios where it will, but gaming isn't one of them.
So you'd think that to offer some relief in the current DRAM situation, memory kit makers would be doing their best to churn out slower sets that are more affordable than those currently on offer.
However, a quick browse through recent newsroom posts shows that this isn't happening. If anything, DDR5 kit manufacturers are either keeping totally silent on the whole problem or going in the opposite direction, releasing ultra-fast sets that are so niche that hardly anyone would be buying them, even if the RAMpocalypse didn't exist.
You want examples? How about G.Skill's DDR5-9200 CL72 kit, or the DDR5-8000 CL64 set from Geil. Even Team Group, a brand that normally offers some great products in the mainstream PC market, announced a DDR5-8000 CL54 set. Kingston and Lexar, on the other hand, have stayed quiet on the whole memory front.
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