When it comes to gaming, one of the most underrated hardware components is RAM. Everyone is so focused on CPU, GPU, and SSDs that RAM silently gets left behind. To be fair, though, it’s also the one thing that has the least noticeable effect on your framerate. So I wasn’t too excited to get my hands on the Crucial Pro 32GB DDR4-3200 UDIMM kit.
Nevertheless, the tech glutton in me couldn’t resist seeing what effect doubling my RAM would have on my daily performance. The Crucial Pro is available in various sizes starting with $70 for a 16GB kit, $140 for 32GB, and $220, depending on where you buy it. Each kit consists of two DDR4-3200 MTS sticks with a low-profile heat spreader.
I’ve been using this Crucial Pro RAM for a couple of weeks now, and to my discerning eye, the difference in performance from my 16GB kit hasn’t been mind-blowing. However, that’s not to say this RAM isn’t good, but rather is it good value for your money? With similar kits from other manufacturers costing less and offering faster speeds and RGB, you may need to think twice about this one.
Crucial Pro 32GB DDR4-3200 Kit Review
The Crucial Pro 32GB DDR4 kit is a rather unostentatious package that is definitely not what your average gamer would be looking for. The sticks are handsome and give off this professional vibe. The aluminum covering the Micro DRAM chips is finished with an elegant Satin black finish and keeps the RAM relatively low profile that’s great for smaller builds like my Aftershock Flux. As I said, there’s no RGB strips on this RAM, which is a bummer for people who love to show off the interior of their builds.
Crucial said it designed the Pro kits to be no fuss and all performance. Speaking of, the Crucial Pro is a DDR4-3200 MT/s, which means it runs at 1600MHz and can perform 3200 Mega transfers each second. Now I know what you’re thinking, that’s not very fast for 2023. Well, unless you’re running a DDR5 system, you aren’t likely to get much better than DDR4-3600 MT/s, and that means the performance difference won’t be noticeable in most things.
Installing the RAM was a breeze, even for someone like me who has an aversion to tinkering. Just line up the slot, push down until the locks snap into place. Then, a quick jaunt into BIOS settings to ensure that Intel XMP 2.0 is running so that you can get the best performance out of the RAM. If your motherboard doesn’t support XMP, or you forgot to do this step, you’ll get much slower performance.
Once everything was set up, Windows booted normally, and a quick check with CPU-Z showed everything was running optimally at the manufacturer’s claimed 22-22-22 timings at 1.2V. Now, I went about my business but for the life of me couldn’t notice any improvements in speed or framerate. For context, my original RAM was some Gigabyte Aorus 16GB running at 3733 MT/s, so I wasn’t expecting miracles.
The next thing was to do some objective benchmarks to see what sorts of differences I was getting. For this, I ran through a suite of synthetic benchmarks and games to see the differences. Using UserBenchmark, I recorded a latency of 77.4ns and an average read/write speed of 36 GB/s. After running other benchmarks, it was clear that the performance gains or losses of the Crucial Pro are pretty marginal — sometimes even negligible.
In games, the results were equally indecisive. With the exception of Forza Horizon 5, most of the games in my testing recorded a drop of approximately 8% in framerates. While that sounds a lot, it’s nothing game-breaking. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, framerate at 4K highest settings dropped from 64fps to 58fps. I couldn’t feel the difference those few frames made.
One thing’s for sure, though: the Crucial Pro isn’t the fastest RAM for gaming. However, if you do much more than gaming, say content creation or even just having an ungodly number of Chrome browser tabs running, you will feel the difference that 32GB has over 16GB. You can have more apps running without slowing down your system, which is always great when you multitask or use demanding applications.
Verdict
The Crucial Pro DDR4-3200 MT/s kit generally delivers good performance across the board without being too flashy. It’s definitely stable and allows you to have much more running. However, it’s definitely not the fastest RAM in the world when it comes to gaming and that’s where things get tricky.
For just a little more money, you can get faster DDR4-3600 or even DDR4-4000 memory like the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4-4000 to eke out the best gaming performance. While overall, memory prices have dropped considerably in the last year, the Crucial Pro isn’t the best value for money compared to the competition. Point is, with the current cost of living crisis, value for money is non-negotiable and for the same price, you can get better RAM.
Crucial Systems Australia kindly provided the Crucial Pro Kit to PowerUp! for the purpose of this review
