DDR4 VERSUS DDR5
HERTZ SO GOOD
USB 4 AND SO MUCH MORE
IF THE RUMORS and roadmaps are to be believed, the PC is about to enter a new golden age of innovation. Intel and AMD are prepping epic new processors, while Nvidia and AMD are tooling up to recalibrate expectations when it comes to generational performance increases with their next graphics cards. It’s going to be explosive.
Is faster memory worth the wallet wallop?
More bandwidth for your monitor
At last, a naming scheme mere mortals can understand
Yet there’s so much more to the PC than just CPUs and GPUs. The PC platform itself and the peripheral technologies around it are just as important. Imagine storage tech hadn’t advanced in the last
20 years. Or memory speeds. Or platform interlinks. Good luck gaming at 4K and 144Hz with that fancy GPU running over an AGP interface, your DDR memory chugging along at 100MHz, an 80GB magnetic HDD that cranks out less than 1MB/s of random access performance, and a video connector that tops out at 1080p and 60Hz.
If money’s no object, faster memory is always nice. But money is an object and DDR5 memory has proven particularly pricey. Blame the pandemic or any of a number of freak geopolitical events over the past few years, but it does beg the question of whether DDR5 is worth the wallet pain.
The DisplayPort 2.0 spec was unveiled by VESA in 2019, but it’s only now that the first devices are being certified, in part thanks to ye olde pandemic. The big news with DisplayPort 2.0 is more bandwidth. By a very long way. That means support for higher resolution monitors and higher refresh rates, and less need to use compression or lower color depth.