128GB. It didn’t seem so long ago that 16GB seemed like a ludicrously opulent excess. What is life? Where did the years go? These are the uncomfortable questions raised by G.Skill’s new RipJaws V DDR4 sticks, available in their most hardcore form as a 128GB 3200MHz kit with CL14-14-14-34 timings.
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Those specs outdo even Corsair’s Vengeance 128GB DDR4 memory, which we reported on recently and run at 3200MHz in their most capacious kit.
Like the Corsair kit, G.Skill’s 128GB RipJaws V RAM is X.M.P. 2.0 ready, which means it’s ready for one-shot overlocking via your X99 motherboard’s BIOS. In theory, then, you could lower those latency timings further or increase the clock speed.
It’s interesting to see so much activity based around Intel’s X99 chipset – both G.Skill and Corsair announced these new kits for the platform in 2016, despite the first compatible motherboards hitting the shelves way back in August 2014. Intel’s latest line of Skylake CPUs isn’t compatible with X99, and yet it endures as an enthusiast’s platform as a foundation for building mad (and pricey) systems on.
While there’s very little logic in investing in so much memory at this point in a bid to increase performance, you could harness all that capacity to run a RAM disk and benefit from its lightning-fast timings by using it as a storage device. Despite the monster timings and capacity, the sticks only draw 1.35V from your PSU, so at least they won’t hike up your energy bills noticeably.
These RipJaws V modules will be available for the princely sum of $1069.99 from the end of February onwards. So you have that long to consider your life choices before dropping four figures on RAM, you maniac.