32GB Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5
All the bells and whistles
LET’S FACE IT, if there’s one thing Corsair should be good at, it’s memory. The company built itself off the back of the great memory race of the ' 90s and early ' 00s, and has since held a dominant position in the industry. Look at any industrial sector that’s reliant on memory chips, and Corsair probably supplies the majority of the DRAM for it.
It's a similar story in the PC gaming sector, with the company having some serious flagships. Back in early 2012, when Linus Tech Tips was just two dudes filming hardware unboxings, the company launched perhaps its most ambitious memory kit to date in the form of its DDR3 Dominator Platinum line.
PC gaming had been well cemented for some time now, but it was just starting to see an explosion in the DIY space. People wanted more glitz, glamor, perspex case windows and RGB illumination, and the higher-performing memory kits and components that came with that. Thus, the Platinum line was born. Clean black designs, top-end NAND Flash, and pristine, beautiful aluminum (ironically) heat spreaders, complete with white LED underglow illumination, and even the option to install LED lightbars on top if you really wanted to make your rig pop.
They cost the earth and came with high frequencies, but for many, this halo product was the crème de la crème of 'Check out my rig, it’s really cool, I’ve got too much money, see my expensive RAM'.
With DDR4 came Dominator Platinum RGB, complete with an updated look and capellix LEDs, super-small, excessively bright illumination for your machines, and of course, with Ryzen CPU’s Infinity Fabric bound to the same frequency as the memory controller, and thus your DRAM, suddenly speed mattered once again, and so the race continued.
Roll on through DDR5 and into 2023, and at Computex of that year, Corsair announced its successor, the Dominator Titanium. Complete with a new design, AMD and Intel variants, removable heatbars on top that you could customize and 3D print your own with (the design file is actually on the product page), enough RGB illumination to make the Las Vegas Sphere shrink in fear (probably), and of course, all the performance to boot.
Take our kit here, for example. This fairly 'mid-range' kit comes in at 7200
MT/s, complete with C34 latency for a 9.44 ns real-world latency, plus 32GB of dual-channel capacity to back it up—it's fairly pedestrian compared to some of the Titanium kits available. 48GB (2x24GB) at 8,000 MHz C38 is at the top end of speed for $285, with 96GB (2x48GB) of 6000 MT/s available at the top end of capacity (for an eye-watering $510) and everything in between. All of them lie in that 10ns range, though, and are heavily tested before leaving the Corsair factory.
Our kit holds its own at 32GB and 7200 MT/s, and its performance beats everything we’ve tested it against, but is that worth the cost? Right now, this kit will set you back $235. For similar specs from Patriot, TeamGroup, or G.Skill, you’re looking at $125-135. Even Corsair’s Vengeance lineups are $160.
So, is it worth it? If you’re after pure performance then the smart choice is to go for something cheaper. But if you need the absolute best-looking kit out there, with some of the tightest timings and performance on the market, then this is the kit to go for.