Wait for DDR 5, or build a DDR 4 4000 Mhz system?

g67575

g67575

g67575

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I'm finding that my current DDR 3 1600 Mhz RAM can't handle some games like WD: Legions well. I know it's RAM speed related, as similar older DDR 3 machines get similar results in this game and others. My PC dips to ~45 FPS regardless of the settings used.

So, what I'm wondering at the moment is:

1. Should I build a new DDR 4 system this year, and get 2x 8GB ~4000mhz RAM for about £100, and a cheap Rocket Lake motherboard and 11700/ 11700F Rocket Lake 8 core CPU?

OR

2. Wait until DDR 5 (probably 2022), and build a powerful Zen 4 based PC? I think Alder Lake will be available in Q1-Q2 2022, and Zen 4, Q3-Q4 2022.

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I have no idea how much DDR 5 RAM / motherboards will cost, and if DDR 5 will provide any tangible benefit vs high spec DDR 4 @ 4000 Mhz.

I recently brought a RTX 3070 FE and it's a bit of a beast for gaming, compared to my previous AMD R9 390, but it seems held back a bit by the slow DDR 3 RAM (maybe 4 core CPU too).
 
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EsaT said:
Clock speeds are this time going to be higher than in DDR4.
Problem is Trump's **** insanely bad latencies:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-vendor-launches-ddr5-4800-128gb-ram
That CL value would be same in absolute latency as using 2400MHz kit with CL20!
(while 18 clock pulse CL would be slow even at 50% faster 3200MHz)

Gotta wonder if AMD adds L4 cache into Zen 4's IO-die to mitigate effect of such absolutely craptacular latencies.
Release of Zen4 might also be moved until there are good latency kits available.

With separate IO-die already adding memory access latency compared to monolithic CPU just can't see AMD being able to afford such bad latencies.
(or gaming performance suffers)
Heck, that would no doubt hurt even Intel's monolithic CPUs, which aren't built around mitigating memory access latencies.
Click to expand...

I think games will require higher and higher RAM frequencies in the future. If 8000 mhz RAM is possible, I think the higher frequencies would (in most cases) more than make up for the longer latency times, compared to DDR4 4000mhz RAM. But, that would likely be very expensive.

There's also next gen CPUs to consider, that will likely be perform at least 20% better than Ryzen 5000 / Rocket Lake CPUs, due to IPC improvements.

I've heard that low RAM latencies can help with gaming, if playing at very high framerates, like 120/240. Personally, playing over 60 FPS doesn't interest me much...
 
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According to this chart, the higher clock rates tend to mostly make up for the increase increase in latency, when running at higher CAS latencies, the difference at 2133mhz vs 5000mhz or higher being a few nanoseconds. E.g. 2133mhz at 7 CL = 6.56 ns, vs 5000mhz at 24 CL = 9.6 ns.

y10obfhbiaa31.png

From here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/cd4gme/ddr_effective_speed_based_on_frequency_and_cl/

If CL24 is becomes standard / common at higher frequencies than 5000mhz, the total latency should be 9.35ns or lower.

EDIT - although, for DDR5 4800 Mhz RAM, 34 CL might be the lowest latency available...
 
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Hopefully though, the increase in RAM frequency and CAS Latency will follow a linear progression, like DDR4 did, like this:

wWeUM82.png

It's possible the total latency won't be much more than 10-11ns for most DDR5 modules, if the CAS Latency is 25, 26, 27 or 28.

EDIT - Unfortunately though, it looks the CL latency increase won't increase linearly. Based on this AnandTech chart of JEDEC DDR5 standards, we can expect typical latencies of around ~14ns for the 'A' / lower CL modules:

DDR5-total-latency.png


That is, if the specification isn't changed by 2022.
 
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mattp1986 said:
Personally I'd upgrade now, it could be another 2 or 3 years before DDR5 based systems are reasonably priced and have any early problems figured out. As an early DDR4 adopter, I certainly wouldn't recommend buying the 1st available DDR5 motherboards and RAM modules.

Upgrade to DDR4 now and get a DDR5 system in 2023 or 24 when they're reasonably priced and show a bigger improvement over current gen RAM
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll certainly consider it in March / April. I'll probably buy the highest speed RAM I can afford.

I find the lack of response from AMD to the Rocket Lake launch a bit strange, perhaps they will simply lower their prices if needed.

The apparent higher latencies of DDR5 does make me doubt if there will be much performance gain - I think the main benefit will come from IPC gains from new CPU microarchitectures. I don't think PCIE 5 will matter to 99% of users.
 
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Zeeflyboy said:
Lack of response is probably because rocket lake doesn’t really change much for AMD and given the leaked pricing they don’t really need to adjust anything either... perhaps there will be a few price cuts (or at least more cost effective non-X SKUs) once RL actually launches but with demand/supply as it currently is they can’t keep stuff on the shelf anyway so probably feel little need to adjust.

Warhol likely to come to help fend off Alder Lake until Zen 4, but I wonder how they will stack up when the rumours point to it being a fairly minor refresh but Alder Lake is looking like a fairly decent step forward.

Perhaps Warhol will stay on AM4 or at least DDR4/Pcie4.0 and thus end up the value option vs Alder Lake... who knows!
Click to expand...

Alder Lake offers around 19% higher IPC vs Rocket Lake, according to Intel. Perhaps we will still some higher clocked, high tier models too?

The thing is, Alder Lake isn't coming this year, Intel are behind on their server processor platforms and still haven't released the Ice Lake SP yet. I think we won't see Alder Lake until the Sapphire Rapids launch (uses the same 10nm SuperFin enhanced fab. process as Alder Lake).

Therefore, AMD doesn't need to release a competitor this year.
 
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Either way, waiting for Rocket Lake's launch + possible reaction from AMD seems to be the way to go.

A large price reduction in the Ryzen 5800x (or a cheaper 8 core variant) would sway me towards an AMD system probably.
 
It looks like the +20% IPC claim for Rocket Lake CPUs is true based on this:

4-1080.52b7b315.png


The 10700K get's ~558 points in the single threaded CPUz benchmark, 20% lower than the 11700K, apparently running at multiplier of 49 (therefore 4.9ghz). The 11700K ST score appears to be slightly ahead of the 5800x.

The multithreaded score of 6377.2 is bit lower than the 5800x score of 6593.

This is taken from the retail version of the 11700K, rather than the lower scoring engineering samples seen on some early reviews.

Link here:
https://www.computerbase.de/2021-02/pr-gau-intel-core-i7-11700k-handel/
 
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Yeah, I'll probably go with a 11700F if the price is reasonable and they are in stock. No point buying Comet Lake at this point. Need a half decent upgrade (at least 8 cores) from a 4770K, to make it worthwhile.

It does seem like a waisted opportunity for the 11th gen, if there's no 10nm CPUs this year (based on Tiger Lake / Super Fin transistors), considering the technology exists but will only being used in octa core laptops.

When you add up the IPC gains from Haswell to Alder Lake, it actually only comes to around 50-55%...
 
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There's some situations where your PC might benefit from 8 CPU cores, like Cyberpunk 2077, or Total War games like Warhammer II.

xxJ2hsYaDZZbTTAeNpR33o-970-80.png

8 or more cores can be useful for other tasks too like game development in UE4.

6 core CPUs are tempting from a price point of view though. But based on the graph above, I'd probably look for a 5600X as a minimum, due to high ST performance. I think the 5600x and 5800x prices will come down a bit when RL is released.

Sorry, I said the C word :D
 
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The RTX 3070 isn't really suited for Ray Tracing imo, unless they find a way to magically improve the performance with DLSS. I think you can play WD Legions on RT medium if you have a decent CPU + RAM as well, and it actually looks really good...
 
The fastest CPUs nowadays have approx. 2.3x the single threaded performance of the fastest 1st generation Core CPU (i7 950). For example, the 5800x gets a score of 650, vs the i7 950's score of 278. Link here:
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/60vs0l/1

From this perspective, you could say progress has been a bit slow, I think Intel's (very) delayed desktop adoption of 10nm is partly to blame - Apparently the multi-patterning of the 10nm fab. process caused a lot of problems with production (high failure rates) back in 2018. They chose multi-patterning in favour of EUV lithography apparently, unlike TSMC's 5nm fab. process.

The multicore speed of 1st gen. i7s is many times slower than 6/8 core Rocket Lake or Zen 3 CPUs, however.
 
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I think of the most noticeable benefits is install time of Windows updates and software. My desktop machine can install updates much quicker, without the CPU being overwhelmed, like on several laptops I've used. I expect install times to reduce further with a new 6/8 core CPU.
 
I'd say a Ryzen 9 5900X (12 cores). Unfortunately, you might need to wait a few months to actually buy one, as they are out of stock everywhere. The price seems to be ~£540.

The situation is similar for the Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores), which is priced at ~£750.

You can buy a Ryzen 9 3900X (12 core) for ~£410, the performance seems to be good (on paper), but maybe ask others on this forum what they think about it.
 
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The 11700K is looking a bit underwhelming vs Comet Lake CPUs, as some have pointed out, the boost clocks aren't impressive.

The single threaded performance is ~31% higher than the 10700, and ~27% higher than the 10700k, comparison here:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-11700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-10700/4107vs4077

Rocket Lake reported Boost speeds:

Intel-Rocket-Lake-Core-i7-and-Core-i9-Final-Specifications-1200x606.jpg


The 11700K /11900K all core boost clocks are only 200 or 400mhz higher than the 11700 / 11700F, respectively. And they have a 92% higher TDP!

Why are Intel CPU still struggling to get 4.5ghz on all cores? State of the art 14nm tech at work ;)

AMD should really offer an 8 core Zen 3 CPU at a similar price to the 11700F.
 
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AMD's official roadmaps have been fairly clear in the past about what products they are planning, if not always 100% accurate with the fab process they will use, This roadmap clearly shows the Zen+ (12nm) series for a 2018 release:

small_zen_roadmap.jpg


Later (official) roadmaps haven't mentioned a Warhol / 'Zen 3+' series at all. I think it probably would've been mentioned on recent roadmaps as Zen 3+ by now, if it existed.

AMD does actually plan several years ahead, unlike Intel, which in recent years has been winging it with Skylake architecture refreshes on 14nm.

Still, maybe there will be more info. just after Rocket Lake releases.
 
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