Our Verdict
Corsair’s new DDR5 Dominator modules are well made and they look great. The heatsinks work really well to reduce temperatures, and the lighting is bright and punchy. However, the price is currently too high for the frequencies and performance on offer.
- Great build quality
- Effective heatsinks
- Fantastic lighting and control software
- Comparatively poor speeds
- Limited motherboard lighting integration
- Too expensive
When it comes to DDR5 gaming RAM, Corsair seems to be a little off the pace these days, despite being one of the first memory manufacturers to have DDR5 products available when Intel’s 13th-gen Alder Lake CPUs first launched. As a case in point, these Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5 modules look superb, but they’re expensive for what’s on offer.
Corsair is now struggling to offer any products to compete with the best gaming RAM from the likes of Kingston with its Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB kits. Even the slower 5,200MHz Corsair kits, such as the one on test here, cost much more than the faster competition, such as the ADATA XPG Lancer RGB and Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB.
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Specs
| Memory chip | Micron |
| Effective frequency | 5,200MHz |
| Latency timings | 38-38-38-64 |
| Voltage | 1.35V |
| Height (from base) | 55mm |
| Memory type | DDR5 |
| Profile support | XMP 3.0 |
| RGB software compatibility | Corsair iCUE |
Another problem for this Corsair Dominator Platinum kit is that its latency timings are barely any tighter than the higher-clocked competition, at 38-38-38 compared to 40-40-40. Corsair used Micron memory chips with our 5,200MHz test sample, but most faster kits now use SK Hynix dies.
Design
The swagger of Corsair’s Dominator kits has always demanded a premium, though, we can’t deny its aesthetic prowess. These Dominator Platinum modules offer some fantastic build quality and great-looking heatsinks. However, they also stretch to a lofty 55mm in height, so you’ll want to make sure your air cooler or other components have the clearance they need, as these DIMMs could easily clash with an overhanging fan or a thick radiator in the roof.
The lighting is superb too, with Corsair using individual Capellix LEDs, rather than diffusing the light into strips. We prefer the vivid diffuse lighting on the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB in terms of looks, but this is all subjective.
The lighting still looks great, though, with punchy colors, and it has one of the most detailed RGB lighting control suites out there in the form of iCUE too. This works very well indeed, but you can also use some motherboard software to control the lighting, or vice versa, with iCUE being able to control your motherboard’s lighting.
However, you’ll need to check with your particular motherboard to see whether this feature is supported, as not all boards can cooperate with iCUE in this way.
Performance
Sadly, the Corsair languished in a distant last place in my AIDA64 Extreme synthetic tests, when compared to other DDR5 kits I’ve recently tested. It only managed a read speed of 81GB/s once overclocked too, with all the other DDR5 kits I’ve recently tested hitting at least 88GB/s.
We were also not able to push our test kit past 5,400MHz with an overclock, which is a shame, as even a couple of hundred megahertz more would have seen it faring better against the 6,000MHz I’ve recently seen from Kingston and ADATA.
Its latency was higher too, at 79ns compared to the next slowest stock speed result of 68ns. Thankfully, this didn’t translate into shockingly low benchmark scores, with a system score that was only slightly off the pace, with multi-tasking performance suffering the most compared with faster kits. The memory temperature was the lowest I’ve seen for a DDR5 kit too, at just 49°C, showing that those tall heatsinks really work well.
Price
The Corsair Dominator RGB Platinum price is $270 right now for this 5,200MHz kit, which is far too expensive for the performance on offer. However, we’re expecting the price of DDR5 RAM to come down as it becomes more established, and for Corsair to introduce faster kits too.
If this happens, then the lighting on these modules looks fantastic, and the heatsinks work really well too, but at the moment they’re overpriced compared to the competition.
Verdict
While Corsair has more competitive kits in its other ranges, the Dominator range offers particularly poor value right now, which is a shame. We’d only consider the company’s Vengeance-branded DDR5 models at current pricing, and even then the likes of Kingston and ADATA often offer better value. There are plus sides here, though, such as low operating temperatures, iCUE lighting, and XMP 3.0 control, plus great-looking RGB lighting.
However, Corsair needs to get faster speeds available at much lower prices across the range, particularly with its Dominator series. At the moment, it’s hideously expensive compared with the competition. Our advice is to get the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB instead, which offers similarly punchy lighting for $230, compared to $270 for these comparatively slower modules.
For more information about DDR5 memory when it comes to gaming performance, check out our DDR4 vs DDR5 feature, where we test the two types of RAM in a number of different game tests.