If you're getting a new Intel Arrow Lake chip, don't bother splashing out on super-fast RAM

HardwareProcessorsIntel Core Ultra 9 285KIf you’re getting a new Intel Arrow Lake chip, don’t bother splashing out on super-fast RAMWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Future)

A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor surrounded by DDR5 memory sticks from Corsair, Kingston, and Lexar

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Intel’s new Arrow Lake processors are grabbing all the headlines right now but unfortunately for Team Blue, not for the right reasons. The best aspects are the fact that power consumption is down, especially in games, and multithreaded performance is notably up compared to Raptor Lake.

However, in games, theCore Ultra 9 285Kand its siblings are behind their 14th-generation Core predecessors, as well as equivalentZen 5andZen 4processors from AMD. Unless you’re a diehard Intel fan or favour content creation over gaming, there’s little reason to buy one.

However, you might be getting one in a new prebuilt gaming PC and if that’s the case, you may also be wondering if it’s worth spending more cash on a high-speed DDR5 RAM kit.

So to see if it’s worth splashing out on a super-fast, super-expensive memory kit to go with a new Arrow Lake chip, I tested a Core Ultra 9 285K with six different RAM kits, using our full suite of CPU benchmarks to see what impact RAM has on Arrow Lake’s performance.

Gaming performance

This is why we use DDR5-6000 as the standard RAM kit for testing CPUs, or something that’s very close to it. It’s a speed that AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips are both generally happy with and most of Intel’s recent processors too.

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In the case of the Core Ultra 9 285 andUltra 5 245K, I used a dual-channel kit (two 16 GB sticks) running at 6,000 MT/s with a CAS latency of 32 cycles.

The above results for the gaming benchmarks in our CPU testing suite show a best-case difference of just 6 fps on average, between our standard DDR5-6000 kit and the fastest one I had, a dual-channel 48 GB set of Kingston Renegade Fury DDR5-8200.

This particular set isn’t available in stores just yet but a pretty similar 48GB Kingston DDR5-8000 set costs$340 at Newegg—more than twice the price of the DDR5-6000 we normally use.

I’m not being negative about Kingston’s memory or prices here, as that’s the going rate for ultra-fast 48 GB DDR5 RAM kits.

Arrow Lake really struggles in this benchmark, being much slower to process 5,000 updates than Raptor Lake and Zen 5, but one can see that the two fastest RAM kits speed things up considerably. Proportionally, though, it’s still only an 8% reduction in the processing time.

Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated the best gains, with a 10% higher average frame rate, though Cyberpunk 2077 produced the best improvements to the 1% low frame rate (an 8% gain).

Content creation performance

Rather than going through the full gamut of our non-gaming CPU tests, I’m only going to show the results for the 7zip file compression and decompression benchmark. The reason for this is that there was little to no difference between any of the RAM kits in Cinebench, Blender, Handbrake, and Procyon photo editing.

Decompression is mostly about CPU processing ability and memory bandwidth takes a back seat here, something that’s true of all our content creation benchmarks.

To buy or not to buy?

Of course, I only tested a handful of games and I do not doubt that some out there will respond more with quicker memory, but a lot of that depends on what graphics card one has. If it’s anRTX 4090, for example, you may get a bigger increase than I did with anRTX 4070.

But I don’t that changes the obvious point here and that’s you’re better off sticking with a nice DDR5-6000 kit for AMD chips and a DDR5-6400 one for Intel (or even the same 6000). Instead, look at how much RAM you’re getting for your money and try to get something with a CAS latency that’s around 32 cycles or lower.

For gaming, Arrow Lake needs all the help it can get to improve matters, but it’s not going to come from a super-speed memory kit.

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TOPICS

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If you’re a content creator and gamer looking for a CPU upgrade, this Ryzen 9 9900X deal will get you $90 offAMD accuses Intel’s Arrow Lake of being a ‘horrible’ product and implies a lack of options for consumers has caused the Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortage

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If you’re a content creator and gamer looking for a CPU upgrade, this Ryzen 9 9900X deal will get you $90 off

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor

AMD accuses Intel’s Arrow Lake of being a ‘horrible’ product and implies a lack of options for consumers has caused the Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortage

LatestMarvel Rivals' latest update quietly killed the game’s burgeoning mod sceneSee more latest►

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Gaming performance#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Content creation performance#

To buy or not to buy?#

Gaming performance

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

Content creation performance

To buy or not to buy?