- ASRock has revealed a new trick to beat high RAM prices
- HUDIMM DDR5 RAM modules are considerably more affordable
- However, they reduce performance, so it’s a trade-off here.
There’s a new type of DDR5 RAM in town and it’s cheaper, but before you start rejoicing that all your memory-related prayers have been answered, keep in mind that there are important caveats attached here.
Tom’s Hardware has taken notice of ASRock’s announcement of its new HUDIMM DDR5 RAM module for motherboards with Intel chipsets. Simply put, they are designed to be much more affordable, but to achieve this, performance is significantly reduced.
A standard DDR5 unit (UDIMM) uses a two-subchannel (2 x 32-bit) architecture, but with HUDIMM (the ‘HU’ stands for Half Unbuffered), you get a single 32-bit subchannel.
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This sounds very technical, but what is happening is quite simple: the bandwidth and density of the RAM are effectively halved. And devices that require fewer memory modules can, of course, be made much more cheaply, because only half the chips are purchased to produce them.
As the company noted in
Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Enthusiast Channel Segment group, said: “Innovations like ASRock’s One Sub-Channel DRAM technology are crucial to ensuring desktop computing remains accessible despite the rising demand and costs of DDR5 memory.
“Intel appreciates ASRock’s support in bringing this to market for our 600/700/800 series chipsets, ensuring Intel users have more access to the benefits of DDR5 memory for years to come.”
So, as noted, these new RAM offerings are compatible with ASRock’s 600, 700, and 800 series Intel motherboards.
ASRock has partnered with TeamGroup to produce these HUDIMM devices and needless to say, they will be entry-level offerings. This RAM will also be manufactured for laptops, in the form of HSODIMM.
Asus is also reportedly researching this type of memory, according to leaks on X, so we could see a broader shift towards HUDIMMs as the year progresses.
Analysis: sign of RAM times
The problem is that the cuts made to this RAM mean that performance will be much slower. Is that a commitment you want to make? Perhaps it is, given the cost of DDR5 RAM right now, which, frankly, has reached exorbitant levels.
The twist is that ASRock’s new way of working here can work alongside standard DDR5 RAM, which is still supported on these motherboards. HUDIMM offers asymmetric dual-channel support at the BIOS level, so you should be able to place a HUDIMM next to a standard UDIMM, and they will work fine in dual-channel mode (with 3 active 32-bit subchannels: one from the HUDIMM and a pair from the UDIMM).
If you had an 8GB HUDIMM drive along with a 16GB UDIMM drive, this would theoretically be a faster implementation than a single 24GB UDIMM drive. So you could, say, start with just an 8GB (or 16GB) HUDIMM and then expand it with a UDIMM later (when the price drops to a more reasonable level).
However, as Tom points out, ASRock’s marketing indicates a non-negligible latency of 90 ns with this RAM standard, and the proof will be in the pudding of how these kinds of theorized combinations work.
Meanwhile, HUDIMMs certainly represent a shortcut to lowering the price of DDR5 RAM, but the trade-off in terms of performance (away from mix-and-match scenarios) will be a high price in itself. Still, this may be an option some people want to exercise, and I can’t say I blame them, considering what retailers are asking for mainstream DDR5 these days.
This also serves as a reminder of how bad the RAM crisis has become, and the fact that hardware manufacturers are looking for long-term solutions like this scheme is not very comforting as to how long this whole thing will likely last.
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