Review: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 7200 MT/s CL34

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What's new in DDR5:

The arrival of the Z690 chipset coincides with the arrival of new DDR5 memory modules. The main change is an increase in frequency and a higher capacity. Be careful, let’s make things clear straight away, it is not possible to use DDR5 modules on a DDR4 motherboard and vice versa. Even though DDR5 also has 288 pins, the notches do not match and this is voluntary in order not to have disasters.

The arrival of the PMIC module:

The great novelty of DDR5 is the presence of a PMIC module(Power Manager Integrated Circuit). Its role is to regulate the power supply of the memory stick. There is therefore one per strip. This one will use the 5 volts of your motherboard and convert it to provide the necessary voltage to your kit. For example, if your kit needs 1.1 volts, each chip will receive 1.1 volts. Previously, it was the motherboard that was in charge of doing this. In reality, this has an advantage but also a disadvantage. The advantage is that manufacturers no longer have to provide this control on the motherboard PCB. So, a financial gain. But unfortunately, there are two types of PMIC. One is locked and will only accept the default values of your kit, this is called secure mode. The other type of PMIC is modifiable and will therefore allow you to increase the voltage beyond 2 volts. Fortunately, Asus on its Z690 APEX, has already begun to circumvent the restriction of the secure mode to reach 1.435 volts. We talked about this in detail in the article dedicated to the APEX.

The other question is about the heat release of this chip as well as the additional cost for a DDR5 kit. Personally, we didn’t notice any extra heat release during our testing. As far as pricing is concerned, it will be higher and it will also depend on availability.

Higher frequencies and lower voltage:

So what’s changing? First of all, manufacturers seem to favor 16 GB strips and therefore dual channel kits in 2 x 16 or 2 x 32 GB whereas we are used to 2 x 8 GB for DDR4. The frequencies are also on the rise with kits that start at 4800 MT/s while the standard seems to be at 3200 MHz in DDR4 and which can currently reach 6600 MT/s. Finally, who says high frequencies says (much) more relaxed timings.

The voltage is also improved since it will be able to decrease to 1.1 volt for DDR5 against 1.2 volt for DDR4. We are talking about a voltage of 1.1 volt for DDR5 kits at 4800 MT/s. The voltage will be higher if the frequency increases as you will see below.

ECC (Error Correcting Code) compatible with DDR5

The DDR5 boards will be able to integrate the ECC(Error Correcting Code). Uh, yes? The idea of this module is to detect possible errors and analyze them before sending them to the CPU. Now, this module won’t be available on all boards since it will increase the price of the kit. As long as we are talking about the price, it should be unfortunately (much) higher.

XMP 2.0 (DDR4) and XMP 3.0 (DDR5), the changes:

We go from XMP 2.0 for DDR4 to XMP 3.0 for DDR5. What changes at first is the possibility for a manufacturer to offer three different XMP for its memory kit. These must be enabled in the BIOS.

The other big evolution is the possibility to register your own XMP. To put it simply, you can optimize timings and tensions and then write your own XMP. Once “burned” on your memory stick, you will have the possibility to choose this XMP within the BIOS. This is of course a function that we will come back to in detail in a dedicated article since it is something that is possible with iCUE.