It’s just as important to make sure you have great RAM for gaming as it is for your GPU.
Buying the best RAM for your PC build may not be as exciting as, say, picking the best CPU or the best graphics card. But it’s important to make sure you’ve installed a sufficient amount at a fast enough speed to unlock the potential of your build. It’s about getting the right combination of capacity, good memory speeds, low latency, and more. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the best RAM for gaming you can buy in 2023.
We’re at a point in time when both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM are relevant, depending on which CPU and motherboard combination you’re using. Intel 12th and 13th-generation chips support both, for example, while AMD Ryzen 7000 only supports DDR5. In this guide, you’ll find recommendations for both types.
If you are in the market in the market to buy some premium performance DDR5 memory kits, then you might want to consider checking out the G.Skill Ripjaws S5. The Ripjaws S5 has a very simple design as G.Skill has decided to go with the same non-RGB aesthetics that we’ve seen in the past, but the new modules have a different heat spreader.
The new modules are available in both matte black and matte white variants, and they’ll blend in nicely with a variety of different build themes out there. Standing at is just 33mm tall, the new Ripjaws S5 are low profile, which means it shouldn’t have any clearance issues inside most builds. This is a crucial factor to consider mainly because a lot of CPU coolers have big heatsinks now that tend to interfere with memory modules. This usually isn’t a problem with liquid coolers, but for some air coolers (especially compact ones), it’s important for compatibility.
The Ripjaws S5 come in a wide variety of frequencies, timings, and capacities. The kit we recommend here comes with two sticks of 16GB each rated for 6,400MHz and a CAS latency (or CL) of 32, and it currently goes for $130. Lower-end kits cost only a few dollars less while having significantly lower frequencies and CLs, making the 6,400MHz, CL32 kit a particularly good deal among high-end DDR5 kits.
One thing you’ll have to keep in mind is that the Ripjaws S5 are optimized for Intel CPUs, and although they’ll work with Ryzen 7000 CPUs and AM5 motherboards, they might not be able to achieve the specifications they normally can. G.Skill does have RAM kits optimized for Ryzen, however, and we’ve recommended one below.
When it comes to DDR4 memory, there’s one kit that basically everyone should buy: Corsair’s Vengeance LPX. Not only is this one of the cheapest kits of DDR4 RAM on the market at $40 to $50 for the 16GB kit, but it’s also got some really good specs behind it. There are also two versions of this memory, one optimized for Intel and the other for AMD.
One of the few areas where this kit of RAM might let you down is the appearance. LPX memory isn’t exactly ugly, but it’s certainly not a looker. Still, the design Corsair went with is low-profile, which makes LPX RAM compatible with pretty much any CPU cooler; sticks of memory with taller heatsinks can cause problems for some CPU coolers, and not having to worry about that is a big plus.
The specific kit of Vengeance LPX we’re recommending has a clock speed of 3,200MHz and a CAS latency of 16, which overall are very respectable. For a very long time, DDR4 with those specifications would have cost $100 at minimum, and today it costs half that. Ryzen CPUs on the AM4 platform are best paired with kits that have a frequency of 3,600MHz or less, making the LPX especially good for AMD CPUs. There are kits with higher frequencies and those could be better for Intel chips since they don’t have this frequency limitation, but they’re much more expensive.
Honestly, Corsair’s Vengeance LPX DDR4 means there are very few other kits worth buying unless you want RGB or much higher frequencies. The price of this RAM is just that good, and until another kit comes around with an even lower price and better specs, we’ll be recommending the Vengeance LPX for some time (until it goes out of stock, anyways).
Ryzen 7000, much like its predecessors, has limitations when it comes to RAM. For Ryzen on the AM4 platform, going over 3,600MHz would often result in lower performance without heavy tweaking, and for Ryzen 7000 the sweet spot is 6,000MHz. Consequently, you don’t really see any DDR5 optimized for AMD that’s rated for higher than 6,000MHz. That leaves timings as the major spec to consider for the high-end, and G.Skill’s Flare X5 Series is one of the lowest latency kits you can buy, and for just $120.
Flare X5 RAM is available in only one theme, a two-tone combo of black and very dark gray. Some branding on the heatsink prevents this RAM from looking too boring though, and overall it looks nice though very minimalist and subtle. Additionally, Flare X5 memory is low-profile, which means better CPU cooler compatibility than taller sticks of RAM.
There are lots of different Flare X5 memory kits, but the one we like the most comes with two 16GB sticks, each rated at 6,000MHz and CL32, which is one of the lowest CAS latencies possible on DDR5 thus far.
