Ryzen 7000 Series – Is Faster Memory BETTER?? [5200MHz Vs 6000MHz]

Sweet Spot

So the Ryzen 7000 series. I don’t want to talk too much about Ryzen 7000, because we said enough about all of that in our 7600X and 7900X content already, but what we set out to do today was to find out if the supposed “sweet spot” is worth it and as always there’s a metric ton of data that we’ve gone through and it all sounds pretty daunting because some figures are up, some are down and some just frankly don’t make sense. In an ideal world, faster-performing memory should see performance uplifts, but a lot of that comes down to if the game or application is written to harness the extra performance, and of course, how the individual processor handles faster speed memory too and one thing was extremely clear, and that is that the higher-end parts, from both AMD and Intel do harness that extra power a little bit better. In fact, on both the 12900K and the 7900X, we see a performance gain of around 1.9% while the lower-end 7600X sees a smaller increase of around 0.4% and the 12600K shows a dip in performance of around 1%. What is clear to see though is that the 7600X isn’t that far away from the 7900X and 12900K overall when looking at the average FPS, and the same for the overall comparison of 1% lows.

A Worthy Investment?

I made it pretty clear on my 7600X review that it’s an ok processor, but wasn’t good enough to fend off Intel’s 12600K for around the same price. I guess I was just expecting more for the money and that’s the crux of this whole feature. You’re being marketed to in the sense of buying faster memory, but you’re not exactly getting much more for it especially when the price increase from 5200MHz memory to 6000MHz memory is around 53% or so both in the UK and the US. I get it, AMD said pretty clearly that 6000MHz is the sweet spot, and I get their logic and thinking behind it as it offers good performance for a balanced budget when looking at every speed of DDR5 from 4800MHz to 7200MHz because, yep, it sits somewhere in the middle, so I get their argument, but on the same hand. 5200MHz is still more than enough, if you’re willing to lose 1.9% in performance but save over 50% from a value standpoint.

My big argument is that the 53% saved as an average, could be better spent in other areas, like buying the 7700X instead of the 7600X which is only 33% more expensive or buying a faster SSD, or putting the money towards a better GPU or something.

What I’m trying to get at is that you have options, and buying faster memory because it’s being branded as the sweet spot, only takes performance into consideration before you go for faster memory that ends up offering diminishing returns in terms of performance, but they never look at pricing while doing these calculations, and that’s where I think a lot has been lost in translation.

Does Faster Memory Improve Performance?

So the key takeaway here is that yes faster memory does give you improved performance. That’s a given, but does that make it worth it? Most definitely not, so buy what is within your budget, and use your budget wisely.

However, we’d love to know, did the results surprise you? What do you think about AMD claiming that 6000MHz is the sweet spot? Does it all now seem to be smoke and mirrors? I’m interested to see what you think!