Will DDR5 RAM Produce More Heat Than DDR4 Memory?

DDR5 memory will hit the market by the end of the year and Corsair looks ready for this transition. In the company's latest Corsair Lab video, Corsair discussed how DDR memory has evolved over time to DDR2, DDR3, DDR4 and now DDR5. During the discussion they then addressed some aspects that will characterize the new generation of memory.

With DDR5, the speeds and capacities of the modules will receive significant increases, offering more bandwidth to users and a capacity of DDR5 modules up to 128 GB. Given that the DDR5 modules will start at speeds of 4800 MHz, it is clear that the frequencies will receive a significant increase over the previous generation. Corsair has even promised to deliver DDR5 modules at speeds of 6400MHz and beyond, great news for PC builders.

As noted by Corsair's DIY Marketing Director George Makris and reported by Overclock3D, the DDR5 memory modules have design features that are missing from previous DDR memory standards. With DDR5, voltage regulation is directly on the DRAM modules, possibly increasing the heat output of the memory modules.

This will be especially true for high power / high performance modules. With DDR5, Corsair - as seen from minute 6.55 of the video - plans to use the latest version of its Dual-path Heat Xchange (DHX) technology to provide good cooling to its memory solutions.

But why do we need DDR5 memory? Most desktop PCs use dual-channel memory. In the early days of DDR4, dual-channel memory was often paired with quad-core processors and provided ample amounts of bandwidth for most applications. Since then, the number of cores has increased and applications have become more complex, requiring more memory bandwidth to function optimally.

If the number of cores increases and the memory bandwidth remains equal, the amount of bandwidth each core has to work with decreases. This can prevent processors with a large number of cores from reaching their maximum levels of performance, which is why we need memory technology that is faster than DDR4.

Someone might think about adding more channels to memory, but adding more memory channels to the new processors makes motherboards more complex, requires consumers to purchase more DRAM modules, and increases system power consumption. A tidier solution is to improve memory standards to make each module faster, more energy efficient, and more memory dense. In short, DDR5 is designed to overcome many of the limitations of DDR4.