Question DDR5 bottom line - speed or timings?

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
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I'm building a 13th gen Alder lake system for a somewhat overkill home server - proxmox for VM's that will be hosting a blue iris DVR, an unraid NAS, and other typical home server stuff. I'm upgrading from a 15 year old haswell system and would like to get 2x32GB modules. being out of the loop, what should i be looking for? is PC6400 a decent speed nowadays? I'm looking at the following modules:
  • DDR5 6400 (PC5 51200)
  • Timing 32-39-39-102
  • CAS Latency 32
  • Voltage 1.40V
 
Jul 27, 2020
24,763
17,228
146
The voltage seems a bit too high on that kit. There are CL28 DDR5-5600 1.1V kits available. I prefer those.
 
Jul 27, 2020
24,763
17,228
146
  • DDR5 6400 (PC5 51200)
  • Timing 32-39-39-102
  • CAS Latency 32
  • Voltage 1.40V
Usually +/- 2ns in CAS latency is the same general performance as +/- 400 MHz in RAM speed. So a comparable kit would be DDR5-6000 CL30. The latter would only be slow in very bandwidth sensitive applications. Otherwise, both kits should perform roughly the same. That's why I really like CL28 DDR5-5600. If you go with a decent DDR5-7200 kit, it might be possible to run that at CL28 DDR5-6000 for pretty sweet performance.