Otherwise, it'll run at the JEDEC standard of 2133MT/s, and you won't be getting the benefit of its higher-quality hardware. If you do pick up this RAM, remember to set it to its XMP or DOCP rated speeds in your motherboard's BIOS. 8GB of RAM is nowhere near enough to keep up with today's games, with them requiring extensive resources and with all the various background applications running on your PC - why suffer? Remember that it's not great to mix RAM sticks of different speeds and latencies, with everything running at the lowest common speed, so it's probably worth selling on or giving away your old RAM and just keeping your new RAM installed. If you're still on 8GB of RAM, this might be the perfect time to upgrade as well. You can see our breakdown on why RAM speeds matter for gaming in our article about overclocking and testing 4000MHz RAM on AMD Ryzen and Intel Core systems. To check your memory speed, you can use Task Manager's performance tab, or programs like Speccy or CPU-Z. There are still tons of PCs operating with 2133MT/s, 2400MT/s or 2666MT/s memory, and they're leaving a bit of performance on the table. When going below 3200MT/s, you tend to lose performance pretty rapidly, whereas going beyond around 3600MT/s you start running into diminishing returns, with very marginal gains and much higher prices. Rated at 3200MT/s CL16, this kit is precisely in the sweet spot when it comes to price versus performance. At 5200MT/s, we won't need an upgrade on this PC for a while.

The lowest price we can see for a similar spec RAM kit is £56, and that's from a much less well known brand.

It's rare to see 16GB of RAM below £50, especially some from a major manufacturer like Crucial, so this is a pretty outstanding deal. That's why we wanted to let you know that Crucial is currently selling a 16GB kit of their Ballistix DDR4-3200 CL16 memory for £46.79, compared to £58.28 for the same kit on Amazon. If you're running slow or high-latency memory from a few years back, then upgrading to a faster kit can be worthwhile. Your graphics card and CPU are the most important determiners of performance, but fast RAM helps speed up anything CPU-limited - including PC gaming on a 1080p monitor. When it comes to PC gaming, RAM is an oft-overlooked part of the equation.

Speccy ram type ddr4