The Corsair DDR4-5000 Vengeance LPX Review: Super-Binned, Super Exclusive

Corsair DDR4-5000 Vengeance LPX 

When evaluating a memory kit that costs $1200, there’s one very obvious question: who is this for? Is it for gamers? Content creators? It’s certainly not for the price-conscious. There are some people with a practically unlimited amount of money who are willing to pay it for the very best, perhaps Corsair are doing it for them? Or perhaps it's just because Corsair can do it?

In our testing, we saw minimal gains in our compute-heavy tasks and in gaming when compared to DDR4-3200 and DDR4-3600. This is primarily down to the Infinity Fabric blockage which on our Ryzen 7 3700X, is around 1800 MHz. After this mark, it limits memory performance above DDR4-3600 (2:1 ratio on the FLCK). While we did see the benefit in our WinRAR and 7-Zip benchmarks which tend to scale well with memory, it comes down to the price. Is the extra $700 worth the 2.6 seconds saving in WinRAR from this DDR4-5000 kit from a DDR4-3600 kit? Performance in gaming between the speeds was inconsequential. 

As for our experiences, the XMP for this kit includes only one profile – the advertised DDR4-5000. It’s much better to include this than require users to enter timings manually, but it’s not ideal that this is the only profile included.  Other kits with a less extreme advertised speed sometimes include a second, lower XMP profile for the benefit of those whose CPU doesn’t have a strong enough memory controller to overclock to the full rated speed, and with DDR4-5000 being so hard to run we would have much preferred to see the same here.  Users can of course just lower the memory ratio to run at a slower speed, but by providing a second XMP profile Corsair could have offered better-optimized latency timings at lower speeds.

To Validate or not to Validate

When it comes to extreme memory speeds, you don’t just need a high-quality motherboard capable of those speeds – you also need to make sure the board and memory are specifically qualified to work together.  Unfortunately, unlike other memory vendors Corsair don’t publish a list of qualified motherboards, the kit is just listed as being for “X570”, but they have told us the modules were developed and validated on MSI’s X570 Godlike, MEG X570 Ace, MEG X570 Unify and Prestige X570 Creation. Motherboard vendors produce their own lists of qualified memory modules which you can check, and MSI’s website confirms that these modules are validated with their four top-end X570 boards.

SPD (Serial Presence Detect) refers both to a small physical EEPROM chip on a memory module, and the information stored on that chip. SPD information is used to signal what the capability of the memory is when a system boots, in order to configure the memory for fast and stable operation at stock speeds. The SPD can also optionally include extensions that store profiles for easy memory overclock, and on DDR4 Intel XMP has become a de facto standard with even modules designed specifically for AMD platforms relying on the Intel XMP specification to store overclock profiles.  It should be stressed that although modules are rated to run at their XMP speed, it is still an overclock of the memory controller that isn’t guaranteed to run.

As far as stock operation, Corsair has rated these modules for DDR4-2666. This is disappointing in a modern enthusiast kit as the processors the kit is designed for support up to DDR4-3200 at stock speeds. A user who doesn’t take the time to configure an XMP overclock isn’t just going to find these modules slower than expected but will find them slower than far cheaper kits that are rated for DDR4-3200 at stock.

Without the option of a second XMP 2.0 profile to play with, it came down to the silicon gods whether or not we could boot at DDR4-5000 or not. Corsair told us that they had had the best luck with Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs. With our CPU, not once during testing could we just enable the XMP 2.0 on our MSI MEG X570 Ace and POST into Windows without copious amounts of errors. This is disappointing for a $1000+ kit of memory. To get the kit 100% stable, we needed to pump more than ideal levels of voltage through the processors SoC, up to 1.3 V was needed. We also check this kit on the ASRock X570 Aqua and ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Impact to see if it would work despite not making the QVL list, and the kit did work, but we still required lots of SoC voltage for POST and stability.

It's clear that the Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-5000 isn't for every Ryzen 3000 processor. A user needs to determine if their CPU has a strong enough memory controller, or given that the user is spending $1200+ on memory, perhaps buying a couple of CPUs might be required, and then either sell/buy new others until a decent memory controller is found. In the case of our Ryzen 7 3700X testbed CPU, it was hit and miss. Yes, we did achieve DDR4-5000 with vast amounts of tweaks of settings and voltages in the firmware for our testing, but for the novice system builder, it's going to be playing a game of pot luck which for the price point.

Conclusion

The question may be, is this literally the fastest memory you can get? At retail, absolutely. In terms of raw MHz, it is. Practically speaking though, unless you’re already getting the absolute best in every other part of your system there’s no reason to spend such a huge amount on memory.

Corsair told us in their testing that actually the lower end Ryzen 3000 processors may have more success with memory stability, due to only having one chiplet, which puts less stress on the internal fabric. Higher core chips with two chiplets may have more issues due to overall heat and stress. It also comes down to the integrated memory controller on the chips: some are strong, some are weak, and it's a silicon lottery. There might be a day where memory vendors have to sell pre-binned CPUs with their high-end memory in order to ensure peak performance. 

With this kit, Corsair is sending a clear message. The company wants us to know that their custom 8-layer PCB internal screening process and anodised aluminium heat spreaders are capable of producing memory that hits the highest speeds on the market. This is a team effort helped by AMD’s processors and MSI’s motherboards, but it’s undeniably very impressive. It's just a shame that AMD doesn't have a big APU to pair with it, as that's where I think we would see the biggest improvement in performance.