Computers have influenced every aspect of our lives including work, study, and even entertainment. Therefore, a high-performance computer can greatly improve our work and study efficiency. Many things affect computer performance, but the most critical are the CPU and RAM. One is responsible for computing, the other for storage, and both are indispensable. So today I will talk about some things about RAM.
When choosing RAM, we can't just blindly pursue top-level high-performance. That is neither cost-effective nor worth it. Although high-end RAM does improve performance somewhat, the exponentially higher prices do not bring exponentially better performance. So when buying RAM we should look for ones suitable for us with high price-performance ratio.
Recently, I purchased a Chinese-made RAM with very high cost-performance ratio: KingBank Silver Knight DDR4 3600MHz. How is its performance? Does it really have high price-performance ratio? Let's experience it together.
▼Appearance
As a RAM brand focused on high cost-performance ratio, KingBank RAM packaging also focuses on practicality without fancy embellishments. This reduces costs while making RAM get back to basics. After all, this is just RAM, as long as it can work and deliver performance that's enough. Fancy packaging is unnecessary.
This is a pair of dual-channel RAM. Dual-channel means they were produced and tested together on the same machine, so compatibility is better and performance more matched. Running them in dual-channel mode is more stable because their memory chips were produced adjacent to each other, making them almost identical twins. This allows for better dual-channel performance.
We can also see from their serial numbers that the prefixes are identical, with just the last digit differing, one being “2” the other “3”, perfectly consecutive.
This is a pair of KingBank 8GB DDR4 3600MHz RAM, which is higher than the commonly regarded optimal DDR4 frequency of 3200MHz. It's like getting an upgrade for free. When I was still using 3200MHz RAM, I would often secretly overclock to 3600MHz. Now since the official frequency already reaches 3600MHz, I will definitely do a small overclock.
The KingBank brand has been very hot these past two years, especially after various online exposures of its high frequency, low price RAM. There was a sense that not buying it would mean losing 100 million. So I finally bought them at the RAM rock-bottom prices. The dual 8GB 3600MHz RAM only cost 229 RMB.
I purchased this DDR4 RAM. Although DDR5 RAM prices have also dropped, compared to DDR4 they are still considerably more expensive. More importantly, DDR4 platforms are more abundant and versatile. Currently platforms that support DDR5 are the newest flagship products, with higher motherboard, RAM, and CPU prices. Therefore, in some situations, DDR4 is still very good now.
For example, many older platforms can also be upgraded. Old platforms are inherently cheaper themselves, and now with cheaper RAM, upgrading old platforms to double their RAM capacity is easy.
Of course, many new platforms also support DDR4, like my i9-13900K. This allows for new motherboards like Intel's 7th gen chipset motherboards to have DDR4-only versions. So the tail-end pricing of DDR4 is quite tempting.
▼Installation
Let's first look at my installation environment. The CPU is an i9-13900K, and the RAM is the protagonist of this article: KingBank Silver Knight DDR4 3600MHz 8GB*2 dual channel. The motherboard is an Asus B760M that supports DDR4 RAM.
Installation is very simple. The KingBank Silver Knight comes with a silver heatsink. At such a low price KingBank can still provide such a nice heatsink, it's quite conscience of them. Clearly the heatsink can allow the RAM to perform better under high frequencies.
My motherboard supports 4 RAM slots, it's a shame I can only install 2 for now. Of course, rich friends who don't care about money can buy 4 to fully populate the RAM slots, it will definitely look even nicer.
After installing the RAM, powering on and entering the system, I must enter the motherboard BIOS to test RAM overclocking. We can see the KingBank Silver Knight DDR4 3600MHz supports XMP 2.0, so I can use the motherboard to enable 3600MHz mode with one click.
▼Performance Benchmarks
We can see that with XMP disabled, the motherboard automatically runs the RAM at 2133MHz frequency, 16-16-16-36 timings. Quite eye-catching parameters.
Of course after enabling XMP 2.0, the KingBank Silver Knight automatically runs at 3600MHz frequency, and the timings increase slightly to 18-22-22-42. Although a bit higher, the performance is still very good.
In AIDA64 we can see various frequency and timing combinations, as well as manufacturing date and other information.
At 2133MHz frequency, we can see extremely low memory bandwidth in AIDA64, only 33GB/s read and 30GB/s write speeds. This is absolutely unbearable, it must be overclocked. After many tries, I finally got the RAM frequency stable at 4200MHz.
We can see the RAM frequency of 4200MHz in Windows 11 File Explorer. To be honest, in the DDR4 era I have never overclocked RAM to 4200MHz before. In the past, I've tried all kinds of RAM brands at various prices, rarely going over 3600MHz. And now, the frequency directly reached 4200MHz stably.
No more nonsense, let's run an AIDA64 memory bandwidth benchmark. After the test we can see the read speed reached 67.6GB/s, and write reached 60.3GB/s. Even the latency dropped 13ns. This is absolutely doubling the performance, amazing. With this level of performance, it's already very close to DDR5! I feel like my DDR4 can keep fighting for 5 more years!
▼Conclusion
I never imagined this small 3600MHz RAM would let me experience the new height of 4200MHz for the first time. With such high frequency performance, DDR5 is not much stronger than it. Most importantly, its price is cheap. So I believe it will still take some time for DDR5 to replace DDR4, what do you think?
The article was originally posted on the WeChat Official Account of KingBank in Chinese; the English version was excerpted.
Original article link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/k4VgC-_paAhnCDC63bzHlw
