Whether you’re shopping for the best RAM for gaming to upgrade a PC that’s struggling or building a new PC from the ground up, the best RAM kit for your money depends on the platform you pick and the workloads you plan to run.
The hard part is evaluating whether faster memory improves performance. For example, if you’re running an Intel system with one of the sbest graphics cards, most programs won’t respond meaningfully to faster or slower system memory. On the other hand, some workloads scale well with higher data rates. For example, file compression programs love fast memory.
AMD’s Zen CPUs benefit more from higher memory frequencies. Increased memory speeds on AMD Ryzen and Threadripper often translate to real-world gains. In games, that means higher frame rates at mainstream resolutions, such as 1080p, or smoother performance at higher resolutions. But the number of extra frames you get with faster RAM varies from game to game. Lastly, memory speed makes a big difference if gaming with integrated graphics, whether an Intel or AMD processor. The graphics engine that’s baked into most of the best CPUs for gaming doesn’t generally have dedicated memory, like discrete graphics cards do, so faster RAM also improves performance. However, if you must pay top dollar for the fastest RAM to get playable frame rates, you’re better off buying slower system memory and a discrete graphics card.
Ensure you check what the maximum memory limits before dropping in four DIMMs, but at 196GB you should be fine!
CREDIT: ASUS
So, the best RAM is usually the fastest if gaming without a dedicated graphics card on AMD Ryzen, and in some isolated scenarios with Intel. But if you don’t care about squeezing out the best performance, DDR5-5600 is drop-in compatible with AMD’s Zen 5 processors, and DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200 for Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs.