Very little has changed with Coffee Lake compared with its predecessor. We’re sticking with DDR4 memory, and the CPUs haven’t changed much apart from core counts and cache levels. However, memory prices have risen considerably in the past few months, with your average premium 16GB kit costing around £170 inc VAT for 3200MHz modules, compared to just over£110 when we first looked at Kaby Lake at the beginning of the year.
This begs the question of
whether the sweet spot has shifted. Is 3200MHz still worth buying at this price, or is the performance gain so little between that and a 2400MHz kit that you can potentially save some cash? Also, how much could you save by dropping down to 8GB from 16GB, and would the performance sacrifice be worth it?
Firstly, let’s look at prices for the four speed ranges we tested this month. We used 2400MHz, 2666MHz,3000MHz and 3200MHz kits, and the price difference between them is still relatively small. For example, a 16GBkit of LPX memory costs£160 inc VAT. Stepping up to 2666MHz with similar timings costs around the same at £165 inc VAT, and you pay just a couple of pounds more for 3000MHz.
To get to 3200MHz, you only need to spend just over£170 inc VAT, meaning there’s barely £10 difference between kits separated by800MHz. Going above 3200MHz still demands a much bigger premium, though, with the cheapest 16GB 3466MHz kit we could find costing just under £200 inc VAT.
It’s clear, then, that 3200MHz is still the sweet spot in terms of price, but with prices well north of their position a few months ago, you can save£80 by dropping down from 16GB to 8GB if you’re on a really tight budget. For your typical £1,000-plus PC, it’s still worth going for 16GB. We regularly see our PCs using more than 8GB with a few browser tabs open, along with a photo editor. If you have limited funds, that’s £80that could be better spent on a faster graphics card, and even now most games won’t benefit from more than 8GB of RAM, as long as you don’t have any other big software packages, or lots of browser tabs, open at the same time.
In terms of speed, our results paint a similar picture to the one we saw with Kaby Lake in January. We used an Intel Core i5-8400 along with a 16GB kit of 3200MHz Cors air Vengeance LED memory. By moving from 2400MHz to 3200MHz, you gain around a 2 percent boost in performance in photo editing,4percent in video encoding and 10percent in multi-tasking, with our system’s over all score increasing by 6percent just down to the memory speed. Rendering saw less of a boost, with the CinebenchR15 score rising from 959 to 971.
The overall score also highlights that there are diminishing returns, with the score rising more between the two lowest frequencies than the two highest frequencies, so opting for memory faster than 3200MHz will offer poor value. As a result, our ideal Coffee Lake memory would runat 3200MHz, and if you can afford it, make it a dual-channel 16GBkit.
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