The first DDR5 memory kit has made its appearance on Amazon and Newegg, giving those most exciting about the next-generation memory the chance to pick them up. The only problem, is that there aren't any motherboards that can support it, not yet.
DDR5 is the next standard of memory that will both increase performance and capacity. This first DDR5 kit from Teamgroup is two 16GB sticks, for a 32GB kit, both running at a huge 4,800MHz stock frequency. Although there are DDR4 memory kits that can hit such speeds, they are rare, and require the use of an XMP profile to hit it. These sticks work at that speed without any tweaking whatsoever.
Priced at $311, these sticks aren't cheap, although that's a reasonably price for 32GB of high-speed memory. DDR4 around the same speed is listed at a comparable price.
The real problem with these stick is that you can't use them yet. DDR5 support isn't coming until Intel's Alder Lake later this year, and potentially not until AMD's Ryzen 6000 CPUs are released in 2022 on its 5nm Zen 4 platform.
The only potential benefit of grabbing this kit now is if you want to lock in that price now. Prices of DDR4 and DDR5 memory, as well as SSD prices, are expected to rise in the next year. Unfortunately, in line with GPU and CPU prices over the past 12 months, shortages of silicon on a global scale are starting to hit other industries too. Routers and power supplies have been in shorter supply and have rising prices, memory and SSD are starting to follow.
DDR5 will be more expensive than DDR4 to begin with, though should stabilize in time.
