It’s no fun talking about memory at the moment, as DDR5 prices are horrifically inflated.  The 32GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-7600 used in The FPS Review’s look at the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has increased in price by 200% over the past year, the DDR5-8800 kit was already incredibly expensive and is now roughly double incredibly expensive.  That’s only if you can find it for sale, which is harder than dealing with the sticker shock.

You do need DDR5 to build a new current generation PC though, you can’t really do without.  That is why it’s worth peeking at The FPS Review’s take on the impact the frequency or DDR5 you grab has on your system.  They tested the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus at DDR5-7200, 7600, 8400 and 8800 to see what benefit you see when spending your hard earned cash.

The key seems to lay not in the frequency but in the timings.  If you have a kit at CL40 or above, it takes a huge bump in frequency to get recover the performance levels you see at lower frequencies running at CL38.  That’s not to say the differences are huge, but if you find yourself forced to shop for DDR5 for a Core Ultra Plus processor, pay more attention to the timings than to the frequency, as you can see in the results here.