Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-5000 MHz; Some Of The Fastest RAM Going

The Rise And Fall Of High Frequency DDR4 For Ryzen

Corsair’s Vengeance LPX DDR4-5000 kit offers one of the highest frequencies commercially available, though kits such as G.SKILL’s Trident Z Royal DDR4-5200 have been announced they are not readily available whereas Corsair’s is.  $1000 may be a bit steep for a 16GB dual channel kit but if you are going to try running 5000 MHz @ 18-26-26-46 timings which have been verified on at least a few motherboards you are simply going to have to pay for the privilege.

The question you will see answered in TechPowerUp’s review deals with the penalty you take when uncoupling RAM frequency from your FCLK.  This has meant that DDR4-3600MHz is the sweet spot on Ryzen processors and running your RAM at higher frequencies can result in lowered performance.   AMD has suggested that a sufficient increase in DRAM frequency could resolve problem caused by a mismatched Infinity Fabric ratio, which makes the Vengeance LPX DDR4-5000’s performance interesting to investigate in two ways; at DDR4-5000 and at DDR4-3600.

When TPU fired up their test system, with XMP enabled they booted at DDR4-5000 with no problems nor tweaking need and CPU-Z shows a NB Frequency of 1249.7MHz and a DRAM Frequency of 2499.4 with an FSB:DRAM ratio of 3:75 so things look promising right off the bat.   The reality is far less kind as we see little to no performance difference between DDR4-3200 and DDR4-5000, indeed in some cases the lower frequency outperforms the Vengeance kit! 

There is no overclocking headroom on these kits, they are already running perfectly at an incredible frequency which attests to the quality of Corsair’s DIMMs and expecting to be able to push them to a higher frequency without exotic cooling and overvolting is silly.  On the other hand, when reduced to DDR4-3600 the timing can be tightened to 18-18-18-43 and you will see generally better performance than at 5000MHz. 

Is that worth the price for you?