Crucial Pro 64GB DDR5-5600 RAM Review: The Perfect Entry Point For PC Builders

With DDR4 being slowly phased out and DDR5 kits dropping in price, many users are finally ditching their old builds to start afresh. Considering that AMD has gone DDR5 exclusive for the AM5 platform, users looking to upgrade are at the most opportune time to take the leap. This is where the Crucial DDR5-5600 kit comes into the picture, a great entry point for creators, professionals, and gamers alike.

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Crucial Pro 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 UDIMM: Perfect Entry Point to DDR5

Specifications

• Stock speed: 5600 MT/s (32x2)
• XMP/EXPO Profiles:  5600 MT/s at 46-45-45 or 5200MT/s 42-42-42 timings
• RGB: None
• Heatspreader: Yes

The RAM kit features a sleek minimalistic design perfect for those going for a non-RGB build. The inbuilt heat spreader has a fairly large pad extending across all modules, ensuring maximum contact between it and the heat spreader. Plugging the kit will set it to the default JEDEC timings of 46-45-45, but using the inbuilt XMP 3.0/EXPO settings will help tighten timings up a bit.

Benchmarks

Test bench:

• CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• Motherboard: Asrock B650 Livemixer
• GPU: Zotac Nvidia RTX 4070

In our testing with a Ryzen 7800X3D and RTX 4070 system, we noticed that dropping the speed and tightening the timings landed us anywhere between 1-5% improvements in real-world applications with an 11% improvement in synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench R23. The improvement was more prominent at 1080p when CPU limited with margins dropping as resolutions went up to 1440p.

While the margins aren't massive in certain games, we did note an improvement in frame times when dropping the speed to 5200 MT/s with 42-42-42 timings. CS2 benefitted a fair bit, dropping the reported frame time by a millisecond which in competitive shooters is a great advantage to have, especially by just switching a BIOS setting.

Conclusion

Overall, the way DDR5 works is quite different from DDR4 with even single sticks of RAM providing Dual Channel access now. This makes testing and comparing against the previous standard fairly challenging, but looking at the Crucial Pro 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 by itself, it provides great value. Going for blazing-fast speeds in DDR5 provides diminishing returns, but the 5200-5600 MT/s seems to be the sweet spot with price to performance in mind. 

Those looking to upgrade or build an entirely new PC around DDR5 will find that the Crucial Pro 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 is perfect for starting out and is a strong backbone for even the highest-end components.