# DDR5 Memory Performance Scaling with Alder Lake Core i9-12900K



## W1zzard (Nov 26, 2021)

In this article, we take a closer look at the performance scaling you can expect for various DDR5 configurations. We test from DDR5-6000 all the way down to DDR5-2400 and compare CL30 vs. CL36 vs. CL40. Last but not least, we also consider these numbers in relation to what DDR4-3600 offers.

*Show full review*


----------



## Lightofhonor (Nov 26, 2021)

Would be interesting to see how this affects IGP performance, but looks like it's better to invest in good DDR4 at this point.


----------



## W1zzard (Nov 26, 2021)

Lightofhonor said:


> Would be interesting to see how this affects IGP performance, but looks like it's better to invest in good DDR4 at this point.


Heh, just today I was thinking "only testing at various TDPs left, then I can wrap up Alder Lake launch" .. guess there's more work to do


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 26, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> Heh, just today I was thinking "only testing at various TDPs left, then I can wrap up Alder Lake launch" .. guess there's more work to do


It’ll matter more with laptop iGPU, you’d think, with 96 EUs. The standard desktop parts are 24 EU only?


----------



## ncrs (Nov 26, 2021)

In the fifth paragraph of the conclusion: "I also looked at memory timings, specifically DDR4-4800 CL30 vs CL36 vs CL40" - shouldn't this be DDR5-4800?


----------



## mama (Nov 26, 2021)

DDR5 needs time to mature.


----------



## FilipM (Nov 26, 2021)

Hmm, maybee give DDR4 a better change with something like a CL14 3600 setup? 

Awesome review though, really nice to see the scaling


----------



## HammerON (Nov 26, 2021)

Great review W1z!!!  I appreciate you taking the time to do this


----------



## dalekdukesboy (Nov 26, 2021)

HammerON said:


> Great review W1z!!!  I appreciate you taking the time to do this


Indeed.....


FilipM said:


> Hmm, maybee give DDR4 a better change with something like a CL14 3600 setup?
> 
> Awesome review though, really nice to see the scaling


I'm currently on an x79 xeon setup I've had for ages, (but many upgrades/changes made over the years) but I am considering putting together a 12900k build and considering cost or non-existence of ddr5 at this point I'd probably just get best ddr4 board I can get. However that leads me to wondering what the best DDR OC'd and at best timings possible would do in a head to head with the various DDR5's out at the moment? 


ALSO, what I'm really wishing is someone would show the bandwidth on a good set of said DDR4 on a 12900k in AIDA for read, write, latency etc....


----------



## W1zzard (Nov 26, 2021)

ncrs said:


> In the fifth paragraph of the conclusion: "I also looked at memory timings, specifically DDR4-4800 CL30 vs CL36 vs CL40" - shouldn't this be DDR5-4800?


Fixed, thanks!


----------



## Wirko (Nov 26, 2021)

You included memory speeds almost down to zero, which is great. However, the results are hard to interpret. The performance drop when going from DDR5-2800 to 2400 is precipitous in many games and applications. Also from 3200 to 2800 but to a lesser extent. It's not proportional (which could be explained by reduced bandwidth) but worse. I'm wondering what's going on in the IMC in such circumstances; it's almost as if it went to sleep often because of slow memory. Any ideas?


----------



## swirl09 (Nov 26, 2021)

Seeing this really does make it apparent how hard a good DDR5 kit will be to get for a while. Its not the first place that struggling to get much more beyond the 6000 CL36 mark.

I hope when I get some time I'll see what is needed to get me to Gear1 and if it benefits much. Im sure it'll be better, but if its actually worth the trouble is another story. Either way, DDR4 was the right call for now.


----------



## nikoya (Nov 27, 2021)

thank you for this excellent study !


----------



## mrthanhnguyen (Nov 27, 2021)

I have seen ddr5 6600cl28 1t and ddr4 430013 1t . Not sure all sample can run at those speed but they are very fast at the moment.


----------



## mechtech (Nov 27, 2021)

Started reading review and all the data and thought to myself this must have taken hours and hours and hours
.................  then got to last page
"I spent almost a week benchmarking—there are over 4000 benchmark scores, but it was worth it."
lol yep

One thing I found odd, and maybe I missed it was the high latency of DDR5 at 2400-3200 speeds, I would have assumed it could do the same latencies as DDR4 at the same speeds.


----------



## AlwaysHope (Nov 27, 2021)

Big job there W1zzard, well done indeed! I'd be curious to see the effects of DDR4 when gear 2 kicks in around 3733Mhz & up on AL + RL compared to all that DDR5 stuff you did. Nice market now for really high end DDR4 sticks out there today. Plenty of kits in the 4,000 - 5300Mhz range available.


----------



## Outback Bronze (Nov 27, 2021)

I haven't seen any reason at all to purchase a DDR5 board hence my DDR4 board purchase.

Gona wait for DDR5 to mature which could take me to Z790 with new CPU's.


----------



## Garrus (Nov 27, 2021)

Outback Bronze said:


> I haven't seen any reason at all to purchase a DDR5 board hence my DDR4 board purchase.
> 
> Gona wait for DDR5 to mature which could take me to Z790 with new CPU's.


The ram cost more than my motherboard. It was an easy choice to avoid DDR5


----------



## potatosoup (Nov 27, 2021)

> ... DDR5 is implicitly Gear 2 across the board—a 1:2 divider between the command frequency and DRAM clock



Is this a limitation with either Alder Lake/motherboards or mostly for ease of testing?  I would be really curious to see DDR5 in gear 1 at whatever the highest it will go at its lowest latencies.  I would guess something like 3600 or 3733 (possibly require a voltage bump?).  It seems like it might have some future-proofing benefits to get into the sparse DDR5 ecosystem with slow/small sticks then plan to upgrade them later as RAM is easier to resell typically than motherboard.


----------



## Minus Infinity (Nov 27, 2021)

Wake me when DDR5 7200 CL32 is on par with DDR4 3600 Cl16 pricing.


----------



## tussinman (Nov 27, 2021)

I'm still on DDR3. Games run fine and windows is quick. 

DDR4 will be plenty fast for years to come, not much incentive to jump shit


----------



## Outback Bronze (Nov 27, 2021)

Garrus said:


> The ram cost more than my motherboard. It was an easy choice to avoid DDR5



They were my thoughts exactly too matey : )


----------



## W1zzard (Nov 27, 2021)

mechtech said:


> One thing I found odd, and maybe I missed it was the high latency of DDR5 at 2400-3200 speeds, I would have assumed it could do the same latencies as DDR4 at the same speeds.


I kept timings constant, so we see the effect of frequency alone, and not a mix of both. Interesting question though, let me test how far I can tighten timings at those frequencies



potatosoup said:


> I would be really curious to see DDR5 in gear 1 at whatever the highest it will go at its lowest latencies. I would guess something like 3600 or 3733 (possibly require a voltage bump?)


I tried lower frequency and higher voltage, Gear 1 is still not working. Maybe I'm missing something, dunno


----------



## Wirko (Nov 27, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> I tried lower frequency and higher voltage, Gear 1 is still not working. Maybe I'm missing something, dunno


There's a lengthy description here: https://skatterbencher.com/2021/11/...ts-new/#Alder_Lake_Memory_Controller_Overview
Gear 1 not working may have something to do with "Gear-down mode", which apparently is a BIOS setting that needs to be enabled. Or disabled. Not that I understand much.

I also found this interesting bit here: "Note that the lowest Cas Latency supported by DDR5 is 20." Is that the absolute minimum, regardless of MT/s?
Gear 2 also means that the clock can be set in 200 MHz intervals, so speed can only be set in 400 MT/s intervals (if the base memory clock is 100 MHz). So, is it impossible to achieve 5000, 5400, 5800 etc.?


----------



## mechtech (Nov 27, 2021)

Wirko said:


> I also found this interesting bit here: "Note that the lowest Cas Latency supported by DDR5 is 20." Is that the absolute minimum, regardless of MT/s?





W1zzard said:


> I kept timings constant, so we see the effect of frequency alone, and not a mix of both. Interesting question though, let me test how far I can tighten timings at those frequencies



Hmmm  so an apples to apples would be ddr4-3200 22-22-22 (jedec 1.2v) vs ddr5-3200 22-22-22??

Reminds me of the old AMD cpu that had a memory controller that could do 2 gens of ram.


----------



## Prima.Vera (Nov 27, 2021)

Looking forward to those 8000Mhz CL40 modules....


----------



## Wirko (Nov 27, 2021)

mechtech said:


> Hmmm  so an apples to apples would be ddr4-3200 22-22-22 (jedec 1.2v) vs ddr5-3200 22-22-22??


And same number of ranks. And same command rate (1T or 2T). Aaand same gear ratio. And even then, one thing is inevitably different: two 64-bit vs. four 32-bit channels. That's *IF* Alder Lake IMC actually makes use of four independent channels - it's not mandatory, and it's not to be taken for granted.


----------



## RandallFlagg (Nov 27, 2021)

Best review out there yet  on DDR4 vs DDR5, very nice.  Looks like we have to wait for DDR5-6000+ with some lower latencies than current to become readily available for it to really be worth it over a good DDR4 kit.   Making a guess, 2H 2022 for 2nd generation of DDR5.


----------



## my_name_is_earl (Nov 27, 2021)

Give DDR5 another year then I'll switch.


----------



## Patr!ck (Nov 27, 2021)

Excellent review. I'm pleasantly surprised by the results of the DDR5-4800 CL30 configuration.


----------



## mechtech (Nov 27, 2021)

Wirko said:


> And same number of ranks. And same command rate (1T or 2T). Aaand same gear ratio. And even then, *one thing is inevitably different: two 64-bit vs. four 32-bit channels. That's *IF* Alder Lake IMC actually makes use of four independent channels - it's not mandatory, and it's not to be taken for granted.*


Indeed.  Shouldn't that in theory yield more performance if implemented properly?


----------



## Selaya (Nov 27, 2021)

mechtech said:


> Hmmm  so an apples to apples would be ddr4-3200 22-22-22 (jedec 1.2v) vs ddr5-3200 22-22-22??
> 
> Reminds me of the old AMD cpu that had a memory controller that could do 2 gens of ram.


Even just a ddr4-2400-c36 (and/or ddr4-2800-c36, ddr4-3200-c36) as further scientific like-for-like would've been interesting, tbh.


----------



## InVasMani (Nov 28, 2021)

swirl09 said:


> Seeing this really does make it apparent how hard a good DDR5 kit will be to get for a while. Its not the first place that struggling to get much more beyond the 6000 CL36 mark.
> 
> I hope when I get some time I'll see what is needed to get me to Gear1 and if it benefits much. Im sure it'll be better, but if its actually worth the trouble is another story. Either way, DDR4 was the right call for now.


Still it's fairly comparative to like DDR4 3000MHz CL18 in triple or quad channel from a relative standpoint with how DDR5 is setup relative to DDR4 with the IMC. It's actually somewhat better than I was expecting at this early stage for DDR5.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Nov 28, 2021)

In reference to the article topic:
I'm going to seem like a smart-a$$ here, but really, who called it? This happens with every new generation of memory. DDR4 will be the best choice for at least 18 to 24 months until DDR5 is refined enough and costs have come down.

People stick with DDR4 for now. Enjoy!


----------



## TechLurker (Nov 28, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> In reference to the article topic:
> I'm going to seem like a smart-a$$ here, but really, who called it? This happens with every new generation of memory. DDR4 will be the best choice for at least 18 to 24 months until DDR5 is refined enough and costs have come down.
> 
> People stick with DDR4 for now. Enjoy!


Someone's got to get the ball rolling though; like with AMD adopting PCIe 4.0 and leading to major investments into consumer grade PCIe 4.0 hardware despite PCIe 3.0 having been "good enough".

This time, it's Intel's turn (esp. after getting some flak for not having PCIe 4.0 mobos out well after AMD's shift). AMD looks to be playing the waiting game for at least a year, if their timelines hold up, and will release a DDR5 CPU as DDR5 matures. Given that most DDR4/5 comparisons show a relative dead heat when including costs and tuning time/effort, AMD can afford that leadership (first to include whatever new tech) loss.


----------



## THU31 (Nov 28, 2021)

I have a 2x16 GB 3600 CL16 dual rank kit. I hope I can stick with it for a while.

I wish you did a 3600 CL16 and 4800 CL30 frametime comparison. That would be most valuable.


Overall it seems that current games just do not need that much bandwidth. And I do not expect that to change soon, considering console specs and the fact that most games are targeting 60 (even 120) FPS on those machines.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Nov 29, 2021)

TechLurker said:


> Someone's got to get the ball rolling though; like with AMD adopting PCIe 4.0 and leading to major investments into consumer grade PCIe 4.0 hardware despite PCIe 3.0 having been "good enough".
> 
> This time, it's Intel's turn (esp. after getting some flak for not having PCIe 4.0 mobos out well after AMD's shift). AMD looks to be playing the waiting game for at least a year, if their timelines hold up, and will release a DDR5 CPU as DDR5 matures. Given that most DDR4/5 comparisons show a relative dead heat when including costs and tuning time/effort, AMD can afford that leadership (first to include whatever new tech) loss.


There is always going to be the section of buyers that want the best, can afford to pay for it and will be the ones who drive tech forward. For everyone else, it's worth their time to balance out cost vs benefit.


----------



## watzupken (Nov 29, 2021)

Good review, though I feel the graphs should be easier to read. In any case, I feel that most people won't feel/observe any tangible difference between DDR5 and a decent spec DDR4. While the charts may make it sounds like a double digit % difference, that may be a small difference if looking at the amount of time to complete a task. Considering DDR5 is (1)too rare and (2) too expensive, I feel it makes sense to wait till second gen or late next year. The only platform that uses DDR5 is Intel Alder Lake now, and it is not exactly an easy transition.


----------



## Nima (Nov 29, 2021)

Computer technology progress is getting so slow these days. I have a DDR3 system from 2013 that can easily compete in some of these benchmarks with both DDR4 and DDR5. DDR3 was the last major performance leap we had in PC memory performance.


----------



## W1zzard (Nov 29, 2021)

watzupken said:


> though I feel the graphs should be easier to read.


suggestions?


----------



## lexluthermiester (Nov 29, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> suggestions?


None from me. I think they're fine. Anyone who takes the time to read the legend that is provided to establish context will never have any problem understanding the graphs.


----------



## Arcdar (Nov 29, 2021)

Thanks man. As always very excessive but "typical German"  ... Love the general overview and it shows/proves what was expected for the first few months and the switch from one generation of system-memory to the next 



lexluthermiester said:


> None from me. I think they're fine. Anyone who takes the time to read the legend that is provided to establish context will never have any problem understanding the graphs.


Same. I think it's fine. You need by far less time to read/understand what's shown here than Wizz needed to accumulate and showcase the data


----------



## THU31 (Nov 29, 2021)

Nima said:


> Computer technology progress is getting so slow these days. I have a DDR3 system from 2013 that can easily compete in some of these benchmarks with both DDR4 and DDR5. DDR3 was the last major performance leap we had in PC memory performance.


I would not be so sure of that. DDR3 might be enough for the CPU you have, but a Haswell i5 will not do you much good in modern games.

And you seem to be misunderstanding the phrase "performance leap". If you look at memory bandwidth benchmarks, the performance leap is huge (basically linear), way bigger than with any previous memory, which always started out at low clocks.
The problem is that pretty much nothing can utilize this performance. Bandwidth has to be utilized, just like cores in a CPU. A game might be able to use all 16 cores in a CPU, but it will not get more performance from doing so, because there is simply not enough workload.

DDR4 was not very useful with quad core CPUs at launch. But then came more demanding games that started utilizing 6 and 8 cores, and faster DDR4 made a huge difference to minimum framerates in those games.
Zen 3 and Alder Lake also have a huge amount of cache, which reduces the benefit of faster memory.

DDR5 will become useful, but it will take some time.


----------



## Nima (Nov 29, 2021)

THU31 said:


> I would not be so sure of that. DDR3 might be enough for the CPU you have, but a Haswell i5 will not do you much good in modern games.
> 
> And you seem to be misunderstanding the phrase "performance leap". If you look at memory bandwidth benchmarks, the performance leap is huge (basically linear), way bigger than with any previous memory, which always started out at low clocks.
> The problem is that pretty much nothing can utilize this performance. Bandwidth has to be utilized, just like cores in a CPU. A game might be able to use all 16 cores in a CPU, but it will not get more performance from doing so, because there is simply not enough workload.
> ...


Higher memory bandwidth in newer memories comes at the cost of huge increase in memory latency. overall DDR5 and DDR4 are better than DDR3 but in practice in most scenarios real world performance is not that much better.
Let me explain to you with an example. in 2013 a 2400mhz cl10 was an average memory speed and dirt cheap(much faster DDR3 memories existed at that time). now in 2021 an average DDR5 memory is around 4800mhz CL40. after 8 years ram speed has increased 100 percent but on the other hand memory latency has increased a whopping amount of 300 percent. it means in action performance can not be that much better. in my opinion that's disappointing.


----------



## THU31 (Nov 29, 2021)

The math is not simple, though. Bandwidth and latency are two different things. DDR5 has similar overall latency because of much higher clock speeds. But higher bandwidth does not help in applications that do not need it.
Similar reason why new versions of PCI-Express are pretty much useless in gaming. And why VRAM bandwidth on modern graphics cards is not that helpful in old games. And why NVMe SSDs are marginally faster than SATA ones.

There is always some bottleneck that limits other components. System memory is not a bottleneck with current hardware and software.

DDR4 provided a huge improvement to frametimes and 1% lows a few years after launch. Same will happen with DDR5, but not any time soon.


----------



## Wirko (Nov 29, 2021)

THU31 said:


> The problem is that pretty much nothing can utilize this performance. Bandwidth has to be utilized, just like cores in a CPU.


Very true. Looking at the graphs to find out which applications scale linearly with bandwidth (4000 vs. 4800), the only ones I can find are Comsol and 7-zip compression. Both very well multithreaded, I suppose. But both also behave in a very weird way: when RAM speed drops from 4800 to 2400, the performance drops to less than one half.



Nima said:


> Let me explain to you with an example. in 2013 a 2400mhz cl10 was an average memory speed and dirt cheap(much faster DDR3 memories existed at that time). now in 2021 an average DDR5 memory is around 4800mhz CL40. after 8 years ram speed has increased 100 percent but on the other hand memory latency has increased a whopping amount of 300 percent. it means in action performance can not be that much better. in my opinion that's disappointing.


Like it or not, latency in nanoseconds hasn't improved much since ... ever. New museum-grade modules that you can buy today (much easier to buy than DDR5, hah) are DDR-333 CL 2.5 or DDR-400 CL 3 or SDR-133 CL 2. All of those calculate to 15 ns.
With that in mind, it's a little unfair to say it's increased by 300%. DDR5 is again around 15 ns, your DDR3-2400 CL10 example is 8.3 ns, making DDR5 80% slower. As for DDR4, it becomes really costly once you get to 8.7 ns or below.



mechtech said:


> Indeed.  Shouldn't that in theory yield more performance if implemented properly?


Probably - or it wouldn't be worth the added complexity.

And yet, in a way, DDR5 is twice as slow, or half as fast, at same clock speed. How so? The minimum unit of data transfer between CPU and RAM is one cache line, which is 64 bytes. This amount of data is moved in:
- 8 transfers, or 4 clock cycles in DDR4, or 2 ns in DDR4-4000, which has a 64-bit channel
- 16 transfers, or 8 clock cycles in DDR5, or 4 ns in DDR5-4000, which has a 32-bit channel (*if implemented properly*).
I'm sure that a specific microbenchmark could be devised that could measure a significant difference in favour of DDR4. It would need to have a very bad pattern of memory access, keeping just one 32-bit channel active, while the other one(s) would be idle.


----------



## RandallFlagg (Nov 29, 2021)

THU31 said:


> The math is not simple, though. Bandwidth and latency are two different things. DDR5 has similar overall latency because of much higher clock speeds. But higher bandwidth does not help in applications that do not need it.



I think the single use benchmarks have for a long time missed common scenarios.  It's extremely difficult to find for example, a gaming + streaming benchmark.  Or a gaming + encoding to disk bench.  Or lets look at something more practical - using Snagit to record video from a MS Teams meeting.  

I think some of the differences between processors as well as memory subsystems are far more significant than people think.   Optimum Tech (youtube) is about the only one that I know that does some of what it calls 'Hybrid Workload' testing, though this mostly revolves around gaming + a few methods of encoding/saving video and streaming.  

The results really show the power of DDR5 under some circumstances.  You are looking at an 87% increase in performance using DDR5 vs DDR4 for this use case.

I think this type of thing calls into question the validity of a lot of single use benchmarks.  I for one, never ever just have one thing going on my PC, and there are many variations on that from something simple like streaming iTunes music or Spotify + browser + outlook + gaming to much more intense scenarios.  That's quite normal for many folks I think.


----------



## Selaya (Nov 29, 2021)

RandallFlagg said:


> [ ... ]
> 
> 
> View attachment 227022


The question is: Who does that? Why not just use your GPU to do realtime transcoding?
(Yes, there's a time and place for software trancoding since it produces much smaller files, but you usually don't want to do that in realtime ...)


----------



## RandallFlagg (Nov 29, 2021)

Selaya said:


> The question is: Who does that? Why not just use your GPU to do realtime transcoding?
> (Yes, there's a time and place for software trancoding since it produces much smaller files, but you usually don't want to do that in realtime ...)



What makes you think he is doing this on the CPU?  

CPU encode would probably require *less* main memory bandwidth than streaming the data to the GPU, since the GPU is going to be like 20x faster consuming that data.  Most likely he is using Adobe Premiere.


----------



## Selaya (Nov 29, 2021)

Interesting.


----------



## THU31 (Nov 29, 2021)

I like that benchmark from RandallFlagg. It perfectly shows that DDR5 does significantly increase memory performance, but you need a use case for it.

I wonder what the results would be when gaming and capturing gameplay using CPU encoding with any of the slow presets (which do make a difference when live streaming at low bitrates).


----------



## Wirko (Nov 29, 2021)

Selaya said:


> The question is: Who does that? Why not just use your GPU to do realtime transcoding?
> (Yes, there's a time and place for software trancoding since it produces much smaller files, but you usually don't want to do that in realtime ...)


I guess you mean realtime _encoding_ of the video from the game. The benchmark @RandallFlagg posted is for gaming + transcoding something unrelated to the game, not in realtime but as fast as RAM allows.


----------



## Selaya (Nov 30, 2021)

why would you do that ... ??????
the _only_ realistic use case i can see is realtime en-/transcoding ie, when you're streaming what you're playing, or otherwise recording it?


----------



## RandallFlagg (Nov 30, 2021)

There are clearly a bunch of use cases that can make use of the bandwidth.  This is why HEDT and professional workstations have quad channel memory.

Also at the risk of repeating myself, we don't know exactly what effect memory has on real world use cases.  The benchmarks run at most sites are run in a vacuum, nothing else is running or being done in order to get consistent results.  However it is very normal for people to run more than one application at a time, you don't game with virus scan off, cloud sync off, no browser open on the 2nd monitor, no music playing, and so on and so forth do you?  That would be rather.. 2010ish.  

This is not to say that current benchmarks are useless, just limited.  When you start streaming music videos on monitor #2 while playing battlefield on monitor #1, what is your bottleneck?  Perhaps.. it's RAM.

"The workloads are divided by application categories that include media and entertainment (3D animation, rendering), product development (CAD/CAM/CAE), life sciences (medical, molecular), financial services, energy (oil and gas), general operations, and GPU compute. "


----------



## lexluthermiester (Nov 30, 2021)

RandallFlagg said:


> There are clearly a bunch of use cases that can make use of the bandwidth.


Not many and they are very specific use-case-scenarios. 99.5% of programs will NOT see such a dramatic bump in performance. Anyone who falls into that category of use-cases will want to get DDR5 right now if they need the extra performance. For everyone else DDR4 is the best choice and will be for the next 18 months at minimum.


----------



## RandallFlagg (Nov 30, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> Not many and they are very specific use-case-scenarios. 99.5% of programs will NOT see such a dramatic bump in performance. Anyone who falls into that category of use-cases will want to get DDR5 right now if they need the extra performance. For everyone else DDR4 is the best choice and will be for the next 18 months at minimum.



It's hard to make people think about running more than one application at a time.


----------



## Wirko (Nov 30, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> Not many and they are very specific use-case-scenarios. 99.5% of programs will NOT see such a dramatic bump in performance. Anyone who falls into that category of use-cases will want to get DDR5 right now if they need the extra performance. For everyone else DDR4 is the best choice and will be for the next 18 months at minimum.


It's 2021 and Windows deserves a more capable task scheduler. It should be able to prioritise not just processor time but also memory bandwidth usage, as well as access to disk and other I/O. That would be a big part of the solution when some resource, not just CPU, is limited.


----------



## Arcdar (Dec 16, 2021)

Wirko said:


> It's 2021 and Windows deserves a more capable task scheduler. It should be able to prioritise not just processor time but also memory bandwidth usage, as well as access to disk and other I/O. That would be a big part of the solution when some resource, not just CPU, is limited.


extremely well said. You notice this limit especially on work-laptops where the handling of specific tasks is pre-set by the administration and you can't really "interfere" with some of it and the lovely software-center starts plotting away in the background installing some updates. The task-scheduler is the weakspot of most usecases right now.

The task-scheduler still handles the CPU load decently well, but the HDD accesses are going as they feel like - which impacts a lot more work-tasks than you might think. Especially if you have some excels as well as Outlook open on one screen while presenting a ppt on the other screen in teams. Sounds like "super light workload" but you wouldn't believe the impact of the stupid update running in the background on the performance of your otherwise still fine work-laptop. Even though you have enough CPU available thanks to the scheduler and prioritizing your focus-application the installer doesn't care and if your HDD/SSD/whateveryourstoragesolutionis is bombarded with "completely unchecked" R/W requests in the background you'll notice it by far more than you might think.



Even though this is pretty unrelated to the DDR4/5 conversation it shows that not everything is HW related and some usecases that people call "far fetched" are closer to reality than they want to admit. Still most of those could be solved by a better SW solution just as well and don't require DDR5 right away / now. In the future - definitely. We'll see a similar trend as with DDR3/4 where it also wasn't a "you have to get it NOW right away or lose out" scenario but a gradual move. Now no one would say "let me get my 12900k with DDR3 please, as it's cheaper and the difference would be marginal" as by now with all the refinements and better as well as faster modules DDR4 is the go-to and no one would want to go back (not even to quad-channel DDR3, even though that served very well for a very long time ^^). The same thing will happen here and I don't get why people are surprised that right now the differences are not "worlds apart" or only in "very specific workloads" (which can also be found for a dual-xeon 269x v4 with quad-channel ddr3 where it outshines nearly everything up to intel gen9 and ryzen2 - but that would be cherry-picking, unrelated and unnecessary as well as not representative of real-world-performance and the "feeling" the user has while working/playing on his machine)


----------



## RandallFlagg (Dec 16, 2021)

Arcdar said:


> extremely well said. You notice this limit especially on work-laptops where the handling of specific tasks is pre-set by the administration and you can't really "interfere" with some of it and the lovely software-center starts plotting away in the background installing some updates. The task-scheduler is the weakspot of most usecases right now.
> 
> The task-scheduler still handles the CPU load decently well, but the HDD accesses are going as they feel like - which impacts a lot more work-tasks than you might think. Especially if you have some excels as well as Outlook open on one screen while presenting a ppt on the other screen in teams. Sounds like "super light workload" but you wouldn't believe the impact of the stupid update running in the background on the performance of your otherwise still fine work-laptop. Even though you have enough CPU available thanks to the scheduler and prioritizing your focus-application the installer doesn't care and if your HDD/SSD/whateveryourstoragesolutionis is bombarded with "completely unchecked" R/W requests in the background you'll notice it by far more than you might think.
> 
> ...



I notice the same thing, tasks which by themselves are innocuous can become quite a strain.  

Background software updates on corporate laptops and such work a lot like Steam updates but you have little to no control on when they kick off, virus scan can kick off, Teams when you have 10+ people streaming video / audio is not a super light load, outlook with 

 in your folder is not a light load when you search or filter or even try to delete or move, Powerpoint presentations can be a hundred meg+ and spreadsheets can have tens of thousands of fields to calculate from.  All of these have auto-save  and auto-updates running.  What's more it is totally common to be using all of these things at once, and more.  

These multi-use case hybrid workload really don't show up on any normal benchmarks.  Even things like PCMark just single tasks a bunch of common office workloads, which nobody but a PC neophyte single tasks in the real world.


----------



## SoppingClam (Nov 30, 2022)

A year later I thought I should add. I have Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600 RGB CL36 36 36 76. I set it to 1.3v from 1.25 and have it running at cl32 34 34 34 70 for the last 6+ months


----------



## Nater (Tuesday at 2:36 AM)

Has anyone seen a Raptor Lake memory scaling review like this for DDR5?  Not finding anything really.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Wednesday at 5:17 AM)

Nater said:


> Has anyone seen a Raptor Lake memory scaling review like this for DDR5?  Not finding anything really.


That is because RaptorLake CPU's are not out yet.

I was thinking of Meteor Lake.


----------



## Wirko (Wednesday at 10:50 AM)

lexluthermiester said:


> That is because RaptorLake CPU's are not out yet.


Your time machine is doing strange things. Replace its CMOS battery.


----------



## Nater (Wednesday at 2:48 PM)

lexluthermiester said:


> That is because RaptorLake CPU's are not out yet.


Ok um.  FORMERLY Raptor Lake.  13th Gen Intel CPU's.  ??

I've seen a few articles that you'll find at sites like WCCFtech quoted by Toms, claiming up to a 20% boost in multicore on 13th gen vs 12th gen w/ DDR5.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Wednesday at 6:05 PM)

Wirko said:


> Your time machine is doing strange things. Replace its CMOS battery.


Oops, you're right. I was thinking of Meteor Lake.



Nater said:


> claiming up to a 20% boost in multicore on 13th gen vs 12th gen w/ DDR5.


You have a 5800X. There is no reason to consider 13th gen Intel. Your gains would be trivial.


----------



## Nater (Wednesday at 6:39 PM)

lexluthermiester said:


> Oops, you're right. I was thinking of Meteor Lake.
> 
> 
> You have a 5800X. There is no reason to consider 13th gen Intel. Your gains would be trivial.


I haven't updated my sig yet.  Gave it to my kid for Xmas.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Thursday at 12:46 AM)

Nater said:


> I haven't updated my sig yet.  Gave it to my kid for Xmas.


Ah ok, then if you're buying new, go 13th gen unless you can get a screaming deal on a 12th gen model.


----------

