Our Verdict
Corsair finally has a well-balanced DDR5 memory range, with the new Vengeance RGB DDR5 costing significantly less money than its Dominator kits, but still offering fancy lights. They perform well and look good too, although DDR5 RAM is still overpriced overall.
- EXPO support
- Clean and smart design
- Relatively low profile
- Premium for EXPO support
- iCUE doesn't work with all RGB motherboard software
- Lighting could be brighter
This is the first Vengeance-branded DDR5 gamer memory kit we’ve seen from Corsair, and it’s good to see this popular brand return, and with an aesthetic tweak too. This new Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 RAM occupies the essential middle ground between the company’s premium Dominator RAM and its plain Vengeance modules.
The past couple of years have been a bumpy ride for even the best gaming RAM manufacturers, including Corsair, as they’ve contended with pandemic-related supply issues and Intel’s decision to mix DDR4 support with new DDR5 memory on its 12th-gen and 13th-gen Core platforms.
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Specs
| Memory chip | SK Hynix |
| Effective frequency | 6,000MHz |
| Latency timings | 30-36-36-76 |
| Voltage | 1.4V |
| Height (from base) | 45mm |
| Memory type | DDR5 |
| RGB software compatibility | Corsair iCUE |
| Profile support | AMD EXPO |
With AMD sticking to a DDR5-only policy for its latest Ryzen 7000-series chips, we’re hoping DDR5 will soon become mainstream, with hopefully lower prices that are more in line with those of DDR4 kits in the future.
Corsair’s latest Vengeance RGB DDR5 memory kits sit in between the bland grey modules of its standard Vengeance kits and the super-fancy modules on the Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5 modules. They’re fast too, with our test kit rated to run at 6,000MHz.
As well as sitting in the Ryzen 7000-series CPUs’ frequency sweet spot, this kit also sports AMD EXPO compatibility. This means it’s fine-tuned for maximum performance and compatibility with Socket AM5 motherboards and Zen 4 CPUs, such as the Ryzen 9 7950X.
If you’ve missed the lowdown on EXPO, it’s essentially AMD’s answer to Intel XMP, allowing it to set its own parameters instead of those geared toward Intel systems.
That said, motherboard manufacturers announced a few months ago that LGA1700 motherboards will support EXPO memory profiles, as well as the usual XMP tech, so there’s nothing preventing you from using this kit with a Z790 motherboard, for example. This specific kit has particularly tight timings too, at 30-36-36-76 compared to 40-40-40-80 for the Kingston Fury Beast RGB.
Design
Strikingly, these new DDR5 modules are also considerably shorter than the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4 DIMMs, measuring just 45mm tall. Corsair is clearly hoping these kits will find their way into more systems this way and the company would be right in that thinking. A shorter height means this RAM is less likely to clash with a fan on a large CPU cooler, for example.
You still get RGB lighting too, with ten individually controlled RGB LEDs sitting underneath a diffusing light bar. We’d argue that the colors are more vivid than those in the original Vengeance RGB Pro modules, but they’re not as bright. The lighting here is also slightly more vibrant lighting than that of the G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB.
Still, you get Corsair’s iCUE software to control them, which is the best RGB control software in the business, and it lets you select from solid colors as well as numerous lighting effects. The only downer here is that, at the moment, iCUE doesn’t sync with all motherboard manufacturers’ software.
Performance
We didn’t spot any noticeable performance gains over the cheaper G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB kit; despite only offering XMP profile support, this managed marginally higher scores in our RealBench tests, albeit some within the margin of error, but the Corsair kit’s performance was still bang on for a 6,000MHz kit.
Also, heading to the EFI revealed two EXPO profiles, with a 6,200MHz option in addition to the standard 6000MHz profile. However, while the 6,200MHz overclocked option proved perfectly stable, we couldn’t overclock the kit past 6,200MHz without errors creeping into our stress test.
We also recently tested the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro in an Intel system for our DDR4 vs DDR5 feature, where this kit’s performance really impressed us. In particular, in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the 6,000MHz DDR5 kit averaged 190fps, compared to just 157fps for the 3,600MHz DDR4 kit, when testing with a Core i9 14900K CPU and GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. It also averaged 122fps in Cyberpunk 2077, compared to just 108fps in the DDR4 rig with the same CPU and GPU. This really is a decent kit when it comes to gaming RAM.
Price
At a price of $226 for a dual-channel 32GB kit, the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR5 is one of the cheapest 6,000MHz kits around, using popular SK Hynix memory dies and retailing for a similar price to the Kingston Fury Beast RGB right now. The price of the EXPO kit we’re reviewing here is a little higher than it should be right now, but we’re hoping EXPO kits will come down in price in the near future.
Verdict
We were worried for Corsair there for a minute, as its first DDR5 memory kits, as with many other manufacturers, have been slow and very expensive. The likes of Kingston might have beaten it off the start line with faster, more affordable kits, but this new Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 kit has a much more reasonable price.
In this case, AMD EXPO support only buys you an extra 200MHz, but Corsair’s iCUE software and wide compatibility, plus its slightly more vibrant lighting than the G.Skill kit, means it gets a recommendation, but only just. Let’s hope DDR5 memory starts to properly come down in price in the near future.