Cheapest DDR5 RAM ranked by price per GB

DDR5 RAM in 2026: prices, speeds and what to buy

DDR5 is the current memory standard, used by every AMD AM5 system and Intel platforms from the 12th generation on (where the board supports it). The 656 DDR5 kits above are ranked by price per gigabyte, currently from £4.99/GB to £147.69/GB with a median of £17.33/GB, and the cheapest kit right now is Kingston FURY Beast Black DDR5 8GB 5200MT/s CL40 DIMM Desktop Gaming M… at £39.95. Speeds on this page run from 4,800 to 8,200MT/s.

Per gigabyte, DDR5 has become dramatically more expensive through 2026 as DRAM makers shifted wafer capacity to the high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. The graph on each product page makes that visible: many kits sit well above the price they sold for a year ago, and the "average" figures are dragged up by the peaks, which is why we show the price history rather than a single discount percentage.

Which DDR5 speed?

• AMD AM5 (Ryzen 7000, 8000, 9000): 6000MT/s CL30 is the sweet spot; the memory controller's 1:1 mode tops out around there, and an EXPO profile makes setup a single BIOS toggle. 5600 is a fine budget choice.
• Intel 12th to 14th gen and Core Ultra: 5600 to 6400 with XMP 3.0 covers everything; 7200+ kits are for enthusiasts with strong boards and show little gain in games.
• Laptops and Macs: DDR5 SO-DIMMs at 4800 or 5600, on the laptop page. Apple Silicon machines cannot be upgraded at all.

DDR5 introduced non-binary capacities: 24GB and 48GB sticks, so 2x24GB (48GB) and 2x48GB (96GB) kits sit between the traditional 32GB and 64GB sizes and are often the best £/GB when 32GB feels tight. Two sticks are strongly preferred over four on most current boards; populating all four DDR5 slots frequently forces the speed down.

DDR5 versus DDR4

If you already own a DDR4 board, the memory alone is not a reason to move: a good DDR4-3600 kit is within a few percent of DDR5 in most games, and DDR4 costs less per gigabyte. DDR5 matters when the platform requires it, when you need bandwidth for integrated graphics, or when you are building around a CPU that only exists on DDR5 boards. Every kit here includes on-die ECC as part of the DDR5 standard; that is not the same as the full ECC on the server page and does not protect data in transit to the CPU.

Brand matters less than the chips inside: SK hynix A-die and M-die kits overclock best, Samsung and Micron are solid at rated speed. Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston Fury, TeamGroup and Crucial all sell 6000 CL30 kits; sort by £/GB and pick the one with the heatspreader height your cooler allows.