DDR4 for less

Josh Collins rounds-up 11 sets of 8GB and 16GB DDR4 under $200 to narrow down which offer the best performance per dollar.

Aquick kit of RAM can provide the subtle difference between fast and faster processing. While the industry likes to tout overall frequencies, latencies are actually just as important — you know, all those smaller numbers separated by dashes.

For this roundup, we will be operating based on a general assumed knowledge about double data rates (DDR), knowing what a DIMM is, understanding binning, have a general understanding that lower latencies are better and other associated subtleties.

Given the market dominance of Intel up until very recently, the majority of RAM kits are binned based on Intel Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP), rather than conforming to JEDEC.

JEDEC is the international memory standards organisation, which both Intel and AMD are a part of, and the standards are agreed upon by a consortium of hardware vendors.

The reliance on XMP over the past decade of Intel’s market dominance has created a rocky road for AMD to travel as it reasserts itself in the enthusiast market. This scenario has been evolving since before the release of Ryzen and has seen steady and swift positive progression since the public release of Ryzen.