Corsair Says DDR5 May Run “Much Hotter than DDR4”

With the launch of the DDR5 consumer memory platform set to take place later this year, with the coinciding launch of Intel’s new Alder Lake-S processors, we’re certainly looking forward to seeing some exceptionally beefy performance gains pretty much all around. – With high levels of performance, however, there nearly always comes a trade-off in the tech world for higher operating temperatures, and following a new video posted by Corsair, they have warned that DDR5 RAM will likely be significantly hotter than when compared to existing DDR4 models.

Corsair Warns DDR5 Much Hotter Than DDR4

Although DDR5 will run at significantly faster speeds than DDR4, with its (apparently) lower voltage requirements, many might have anticipated that the temperature levels might have been lower or at least on par with that seen on the current platform. In the video, however, Corsair has said that with DDR5 transitioning voltage regulation to the memory modules themselves rather than the motherboard, they have to utilise a new Dual-path Heat Xchange (DHX) technology to compensate for this.

The bottom line, however, is that chunky heatsinks might become not so much of a performance-boosting aspect of DDR5 memory, but perhaps a required one!

What Do We Think?

With this news, we would fully expect that temperatures will vary on the DDR5 platform based largely based upon four factors. How well the memory has been designed, how fast it performs, how good the heat sinks (and/or management) are within the design, and also likely the quality of the VRM. – With this in mind though, if DDR5 memory is possibly going to be a bit toasty, let’s hope that Intel’s Alder Lake-S processors are not otherwise cooling solutions are clearly going to be a hot topic for these new product releases!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!