Corsair Releases 5GHz Memory Kit That You Can Buy Today

You may find it hard to get excited about memory compared to some other components, but companies haven’t seemed to slow down on the production of fancier kits, and more importantly, faster kits. We’ve even seen overclocking records continue to be broken, such as with Toppc’s G.SKILL DDR4-6000 overclock we talked about last month.

Well, Corsair’s latest kit might not be 6GHz, but it has something important going for it: it’s meant to be used for more than a one-off benchmarking run. With a CAS latency of 18 (full latencies: 18-26-26-46), this DDR4-5000 kit really has some impressive timings.

With its CL18 timing at DDR4-5000, this kit has an actual latency of 7.2 ns (18 / (5000/2) * 1000). By comparison, a really well-spec’d DDR4-3200 CL14 kit comes out to 8.75 ns. That DDR4-6000 overclock? The unfathomable pain it took to reach that sky-high frequency required the CAS latency to be dropped to 31, resulting in an actual latency of 10.3 ns.

So… all things considered, Corsair’s new kit is seriously fast.

At Computex, we saw DDR4-5200 memory on display by G.SKILL, and as far as we knew it, that was supposed to hit the market at some point. Our Google-fu couldn’t bring anything up to verify that, so we’re not sure if it actually happened. To Corsair’s benefit, its DDR4-5000 kit is actually available right now, at least while supply’s last.

What’s this super-spec’d RAM going to cost you? Corsair’s currently asking $1,224.99 USD, which is a tad on the high side, since a typical DDR4-4000 16GB kit costs around $150. But hey – it can’t be that easy spec’ing a kit like this that’s actually meant to be reliable. And on that front, if you want to take the best advantage of this kit, Corsair has validated it to work on four different MSI AMD motherboards, including the MEG X570 Unify and MEG X570 ACE. In case heat ever becomes an issue, this kit also includes a Vengeance Airflow Fan that can help keep things under control, though we’re not sure it is actually required.