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I mentioned on the first page that this system ships with 2400MHz DDR4 memory. There is 16GB of it, but Ryzen's performance scales well with faster memory due to the nature of the Infinity Fabric, so I wanted to see what difference we would get by swapping in something a bit faster. So, for the tests below, I used 16GB of G.Skill Sniper X memory running at 3400MHz compared against the default 2400MHz DDR4.
Memory testing
Memory Testing Overview
Starting with our AIDA64 memory benchmark, unsurprisingly the faster memory outstrips the 2400MHz kit in terms of read, write and copy speeds. Cinebench R15 and R20 show marginal improvements to using the faster memory, but it is the games testing I am most interested in.
Here, we can see quite a difference when using the 3400MHz DDR4 kit – though it does depend on the game. Far Cry 5, for instance, is noticeably CPU-bound at 1080p, so the faster RAM helps our average frame rate increase by over 10 FPS – a very good improvement. In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, average frame rate rose 5FPS, with minimum frame rates rising by almost 8FPS. Ghost Recon Wildlands is the odd one out, with the faster memory making little difference.
Now, I am not saying this system should be sold with DDR4-3400MHz memory – the jump in cost from a 2400MHz kit to 3400MHz is unreasonably high for this £1349 PC. That being said, these tests do show the machine is losing out on a fair bit of performance when gaming with 2400MHz memory, so I do think that this system needs to come with faster RAM by default.
An upgrade to 3200MHz memory, for instance, is available through Cyberpower's own website for just £17 extra, which is in-line with the pricing I've seen for 2x8GB kits online. When you're paying £1349 already, though, for something that does make a decent improvement to the gaming experience, I think this faster memory should be included as part of the base configuration.
