G.Skill showcases 32GB DDR4 running at 3,333MHz

by Tarinder Sandhu on 9 September 2014, 20:34

Tags: G.SKILL

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Pushing the boundaries of what's possible with nascent DDR4 memory introduced in concert with the Intel Core i7-5960X processor last month, memory specialists G.Skill showcased an 8-DIMM, 32GB kit operating at a native 3,333MHz at the Intel Developer Forum today.

Cranking up the speed from the reviewed Ripjaws 4 3,000MHz memory, G.Skill claims it is the only vendor to offer a 32GB capacity with class-leading speeds, following on from a 16GB (4x4GB) quad-channel kit announced earlier.

The normal recipe for increasing speeds is to also increase latencies. G.Skill, however, keeps timings at 16-16-16-36, and the 32GB set has been validated on the Asus Rampage V Extreme X99 motherboard. Under the new heatspreaders is specially screened ICs from Hynix.

Benchmarking at over 70GB/s on the popular AIDA benchmark and therefore comfortably ahead of the results we achieved on the 3,000MHz set, super-fast DDR4 is a supremely niche product, reserved for those who want the very last drop of performance from the X99 platform.

And such performance doesn't come cheap. A combination of DDR4 scarcity and bleeding-edge speeds means G.Skill estimates the 32GB kit will cost in the region of $1,400 when released in limited quantities later on this month.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Posted by MrComputerSaint - Tue 09 Sep 2014 23:19
$1400 is a lot of money. How long will it be before games / applications need that amount of memory do people think?

Maybe less than 3 years?
Posted by philipmathews - Wed 10 Sep 2014 06:47
DDR4 is a lot of money, especially as you consider the gains you are going to make are marginal. You need to be running some serious hardware before this makes a difference.
Posted by Axle_Grease - Wed 10 Sep 2014 08:50
MrComputerSaint
$1400 is a lot of money. How long will it be before games / applications need that amount of memory do people think?

Maybe less than 3 years?

It wasn't too long ago I thought RAM disks would make a comeback in the form of ultra high performance storage for very high quality video capture, but I now think that is a role better handled by PCIe SSDs when they become cheaper. So I don't know how end-consumers like us will eventually utilize 32GB of system memory let alone when.
Posted by MrComputerSaint - Wed 10 Sep 2014 12:22
Both good points, you certainly do need to be running excellent hardware and you'll be needing to use the programs that can really take advantage of the RAM.
Axle_grease, you might still be right with RAM disks coming to the market as that would make sense after the larger 32 and 64GB capacities are reached. If you had a SSD type device but had 4 x connectors to plug into the RAM slots on a motherboard then that'd be useful for the very high capacity systems.

I think that type of device would be used in servers however before making its way to the home user market.

I don't think my whole PC even cost $1400
Posted by zaph0d - Wed 10 Sep 2014 14:50
Axle_Grease
MrComputerSaint
$1400 is a lot of money. How long will it be before games / applications need that amount of memory do people think?

Maybe less than 3 years?

It wasn't too long ago I thought RAM disks would make a comeback in the form of ultra high performance storage for very high quality video capture, but I now think that is a role better handled by PCIe SSDs when they become cheaper. So I don't know how end-consumers like us will eventually utilize 32GB of system memory let alone when.

I use Ramdisks for playing games myself.
I use plain old mechanical drives to store the disk images and just mount the ramdisk for whatever game, takes 30-60s depending of size of game, for eg 18GB of modded skyrim is 54s and that's the largest load I have. Ingame there's no loads whatsoever.
I would use SSD's if there was any performance benefit but as I'm using sataII (Old socket 1366 with xeon5650 hexcore) there's no benefit of SSD over a pair of 750GB mech drives… at least as far as games go, for loading windows it'd probably be worth it in normal circumstances, but I just hibernate and that allows load times that're comparable to SSD anyway.