World News – USA – Black Friday 2020 RAM Deals: The Best DDR4 Memory Deals

. . If you're looking to upgrade your PC with new DDR4 RAM this Black Friday, check out the best Black Friday RAM deals here.

CAMEROON MAGAZINE - GM27/11/20205 Mins read45 Views

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Black Friday is finally here, and we’ve rounded up the best DDR4 RAM deals to save you the hassle of looking for them yourself. You can find all kinds of sizes and speeds here. Black Friday RAM deals span both the UK and the US. Whether you’re just adding more RAM to your existing system or buying a brand new set, every RAM listing you can find below has the RPS stamp of approval. So let’s get started!

To keep things nice and simple, we’ve broken our best Black Friday RAM deals into UK and US deals. You can jump straight to the offers most relevant to you by clicking on the links on the right. Or you can just keep reading for the full spread. Also, at the end of this article, you will find everything you need to know about buying new RAM sticks in 2020, including the need for games, the speed you should aim for, and the pros and cons of RAM latency figures.

It’s not just RAM that goes cheap on Black Friday. For more Black Friday deals, please visit our regularly updated hub pages:

Do you need help choosing the right memory for your PC? Read our handy guide to buying RAM below, where we explain how much RAM you actually need to buy and the speeds and latencies to watch out for. Obviously, filling your motherboard with a lot of RAM won’t necessarily get you better performance in games, but having enough is still important.

What RAM do we use with RPS?
Unlike other components we’ll cover here at RPS, we don’t have a list of the best RAMs today. However, we can tell you what we use ourselves, both in our everyday PCs and in various test devices, all of which come with a big thumbs up if you’re not sure what to buy.

For the best budget RAM, we recommend the Vengeance LPX RAM from Corsair. It is the ubiquitous workhorse of the DDR4 world and arguably the cheapest RAM that is consistently reliable and fast. We have purchased three kits over the years for three different builds, all of which have served with merit.

Our best high-end RAM choice is Crucial’s Ballistix Elite, which runs at 4000MHz out of the box and offers more than enough throughput to keep a PC running at top speed. It’s very expensive and you need a CPU and motherboard that can of course support this. However, as long as these are relatively new, you should be fine.

However, when it comes to RGB-RAM, our best recommendation for RGB-RAM is Hyperury’s Fury RGB. It’s a decent performer and unlike other over-the-top RGB RAM kits, the HyperX Fury RGB does it just right. It has a tasteful stripe on the top that adds flair without blowing up the retina and can be customized via HyperX’s NGenuity software.

Not all memory is created equal, however, and the speed and latency of different kits can lead to noticeable, albeit minor, differences in performance, especially if you are also using your gaming rig for more sophisticated design software. Fortunately, this all sounds more complicated than it actually is, and by the end of this handy guide, hopefully you’ll be ready to choose your next RAM upgrade.

This is where it gets personal. Since games alone require no more than a few GB of RAM, most PCs are fine with 8 GB total. We still highly recommend using this in the form of a 2x4GB kit, as using two sticks in a two-channel configuration doubles the bandwidth you would get with a single-channel setup. These aren’t significantly more expensive than individual 8GB sticks, however, so it’s still a great option if you’re on a budget.

However, if you can afford to expand to 16GB, you have a much better chance of avoiding slowdowns by running other software at the same time as your games. Streaming software or certain browsers, especially if you’ve collected tabs, are definitely using up your available storage, and even if you’re not using the full 16GB (ideally in a 2x8GB configuration), doing so is a lot better than that too not enough. You can also work more smoothly with video editing or CAD software if you do a little creative work on the side.

Speaking of which, 32GB is suitable for heavy-duty multitasking and is well worth the investment if your PC needs to accommodate the most intensive software – like 3D modeling suites – along with games. For a more focused gaming system, however, this could be an exaggeration, which is why you’ll often hear 16GB, which is known as the « sweet spot » of PC memory. It’s hard to argue too much about this, but make sure you choose an amount that suits your specific needs.

As with CPUs, RAM speed is measured in MHz or how many cycles can be executed in one second. The base speed for DDR4 is 2. 133 MHz or 2. 133 billion cycles per second, which sounds like a lot – but while that’s fine for basic desktop use, games generally benefit from a touch of extra pace.

2. 400 MHz is a good starting point if you want to keep things cheap and 3. 000 MHz to 3. 200 MHz RAM is better at protecting against bottlenecks when you run out of memory. Faster than that, and you’re entering enthusiast territory: Officially, Ryzen’s top Ryzen chips support RAM speeds of up to 3. 200 MHz, while official support from Intel at 2. 933 MHz is maximum, but both with overclocked RAM over the 5th. The 000 MHz mark. If you are interested in extreme overclocking, be sure to check out what your motherboard as well as CPU supports.

It’s also worth noting that higher memory speeds don’t help much since the main purpose of memory is to enable the CPU. If the processor is the bottleneck of your PC and not memory, it doesn’t help much. In other words, don’t blast your money into the fastest and most overclockable memory when it is better spent on a new CPU.

The other metric to watch out for is latency. The RAM kit specs often include the latency values, sometimes referred to as « timings, » as a series of four numbers – for example 14-16-16-31 – and the main number to look out for is the first. This is the CAS latency of the RAM. In the same example, it would take 14 cycles to transfer data to the CPU.

Of course, lower latency means faster performance. While CAS latency can help you decide between two sets of RAM at the same clock speed, it’s more likely that drastically faster speeds will outweigh the lower latencies. If a 3. 200 MHz kit has a CAS latency of 16, the overall performance is still better than a 2. 400 MHz kit with a CAS latency of 14 as it can go through much faster even if it needs more cycles.

Tagged Black Friday, Deals, Hardware, RAM.

If you click on our links to online stores and make a purchase, we may receive a few cents. More information can be found here.

Katharine writes about all of the parts of your PC so you can play all the beautiful games we love to talk about. Really liked JRPGs and getting quests. She is also RPS ‘Resident Deals Herald.