DDR4 vs DDR5 with i7 13700

[mankymanning]

I am looking to upgrade my Unraid system. I currently have an i7 9700 with 32GB of DDR4 2666 memory. My system is used for gaming, VMs, media server and dockers. I have 6 cores assigned to the gaming VM (which has an RX6800 passed through) and then unraid and docker just does its stuff although I don't specifically limit to cores 1 and 2.

I would like a bit more CPU grunt in the gaming side of things and am currently thinking of trying to get a 13700 with Z690/Z790 motherboard. Plan being to assign 8 P cores to the VM and the 8 E cores to unraid (I am assuming the E cores still can do iGPU transcoding?)

Is it worth going with DDR5? I could spread the cost of this by re-using my existing memory but I think that locks me into the choices of a DDR4 motherboard then from what I can tell.

 

[Tetras]

(I am assuming the E cores still can do iGPU transcoding?)

The IGP is a separate thing, so for the most part I think it would be distinct from the cores, though there are some codecs which trigger hybrid/software encode/decode instead of hardware.

I would like a bit more CPU grunt in the gaming side of things and am currently thinking of trying to get a 13700 with Z690/Z790 motherboard. Plan being to assign 8 P cores to the VM and the 8 E cores to unraid

FYI: the 14700 has 12 E-Cores.

I could spread the cost of this by re-using my existing memory but I think that locks me into the choices of a DDR4 motherboard then from what I can tell.

If you're looking for an upgrade to 64GB for your VM stuff, then yes, I would switch to DDR5, but right now even though the max capacity of DDR5 is 256GB, no DDR5 CPU is keen on running 4 sticks at high speeds.

Is it worth going with DDR5?

At 4K, for gaming, the answer is generally: no. 1080p: yes.

Fast DDR5 memory does show gains with high-end Intel CPUs and high-end graphics cards, but they're usually only noticed once you're comfortably past the point of playability anyway.