Best RAM for gaming in 2025

Kingston came out with the right RAM at the right time with this memory, which offered great lighting and looks with a price that wasn’t ridiculous. We instantly fell in love with it, and a couple of years later the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB continues to impress, with its price dropping further.

Unlike a lot of RGB DDR5 RAM, the Fury Beast is also available in dual-channel 16GB (2 x 8GB) kits, which is ideal if you know you don’t need more than 16GB, and want some good-looking memory that doesn’t cost the earth.

We particularly liked the bright and vivid lighting on the Fury Beast’s heatsinks, which not only syncs up with Kingston’s own (and very capable) CTRL software, but also cooperates with RGB software from all the best gaming motherboard makers, including Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, and ASRock.

We tested a 6,000MHz kit for our review, and found we were able to overclock it to 6,200MHz to gain even more performance too. However, our test kit had quite loose CL40 timings, and we recommend going for a CL36 kit now that they’re so much cheaper.

The only problem for the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB is that, since it was released, many other RAM manufacturers have released similarly-specced kits in the same pricing ballpark. It’s still great RAM, but it’s not quite the bargain it once was.

Read our full Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB review.

We were a little worried about Corsair when its first DDR5 RAM first came out, with the company only offering its basic non-RGB kits at one end of the scale, and its super-premium Dominator RAM at the other end. Thankfully, the company finally came out with a happy medium a while later, and the Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 is a solid range of gaming RAM.

In particular, if you have an AMD Socket AM5 system, using either a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 CPU, such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, then this memory has the added bonus of coming in kits that support AMD’s EXPO profile tech.

A bit like Intel’s XMP system, this enables your AMD motherboard to detect the top rated speeds and timings of your kit and apply them with a couple of clicks in your BIOS. 

We were also pleasantly surprised to find that our 6,000MHz test kit also came with an extra overclocked EXPO profile to run it at 6,200MHz, which worked fine in our tests with no errors. The only downside is that the EXPO RAM is often more expensive than the equivalent Intel kits.

Speaking of which, you can also buy Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 RAM with Intel XMP 3.0 support, which we tested for DDR4 vs DDR5 feature. We were really impressed with the performance, with a 6,000MHz kit averaging 190fps in Assassin’s Creed Mirage in our Core i9 14900K test rig with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, compared to just 157fps with the same core spec using 3,600MHz DDR4 RAM.

The RGB lighting on this RAM isn’t as punchy as the RGB light show on the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB, but it does still look good, and Corsair’s iCUE software offers a lot of control over the colors and effects. This is a solid RGB DDR5 RAM kit, especially if you have an AMD Socket AM5 rig.

Read our full Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5  review. 

Corsair’s premium DDR5 modules got off to a bit of a shaky start when they were first released, with overly high prices and poor speeds. Thankfully, since then, the prices have dropped dramatically, and there’s a wide range of speeds available now too.

This Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB memory is still more expensive than everyday RGB DDR5 sticks, of course, but they have a number of perks to tempt you their way. At the top of the list are the gorgeous, hefty heatsinks, which not only look good, but also work really well at cooling. In fact, this RAM only hit 49°C during our tests, which is the coolest result we’ve ever seen from a DDR5 kit.

The only issue here is that these loft heatsinks have a height of 55mm, so you’ll need to make sure you have enough clearance from your CPU cooler to get them into your case. These are not low-profile modules.

The RGB lighting is fantastic too, with Corsair’s individual Capellix LEDs producing a bright and punchy light show. There’s no diffusing going on here, so you see the individual LEDs, rather than a single strip, but the lighting is superb if that’s the look you want to achieve.

Of the current speeds available, we recommend going for a a fast kit with tight timings if you plan to splash out on your RAM. An effective frequency of 6,000MHz, with 30-36-36-76 timings is the sweet spot here, as found in Corsair’s CMT32GX5M2B6000C30 kit if you have an Intel system. That will cost you a premium, but the price difference thankfully isn’t huge any more.

Read our full Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5 review.

On the face of it, upgrading your laptop memory should be much simpler than buying new desktop RAM. No one worries about RGB lighting on these little modules that are hidden away under your laptop’s keyboard, and heatsinks are less of a consideration too. However, before you take the plunge, make sure you do your research on what RAM your laptop can take.

Some of the best gaming laptop models, including the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, use soldered RAM, meaning you can’t swap it out. Others have soldered RAM, but also a SODIMM slot, meaning you need to match your new RAM with what’s already in your laptop as best possible. Accessing your laptop’s RAM SODIMM slots isn’t always easy either, requiring you to unscrew (and not lose) multiple tiny screws, and sometimes even remove heatsinks and ribbon cables.

Once you’ve established what you can upgrade and how to do it, you can choose your memory, and if your laptop has two SODIMM slots, we recommend removing your existing memory and replacing it with a new dual-channel kit. This G.Skill Ripjaws DDR5 RAM is ideal for the job, coming in a range of speeds with very competitive prices.

In particular, for most people’s DDR5 needs, we recommend going for a 32GB (2 x 16GB) kit, running at 5,600MHz with CL40 latency timings. G.Skill’s F5-5600S4040A16GX2-RS kit is ideal here, but this range also comes in lots of other configurations, covering single modules, and speeds from 4,800MHz to 6,000MHz.

This veteran of the gaming RAM world is still a star contender if you want to upgrade a DDR4 system, especially at current prices. If you only have 16GB of RAM in your PC right now, then an upgrade to a 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro kit will make a big difference to your PC’s multi-tasking abilities, while costing you well under $100.

This isn’t budget RAM either, with a classy diffuser strip on top of its RGB LEDs, which can be controlled through Corsair’s superb iCUE software. One benefit of this memory over a lot of others is that you can also buy dummy modules that cost much less than standard memory modules, meaning you can fill all four of your motherboard slots to create a full-on light show next to your CPU area.

In our tests, we found that the 32GB 3,600MHz CMW32GX4M2D3600C18 version of this memory was a solid option in our real-world benchmark tests, and we were also able to stably overclock it to 3,866MHz to make it run a little quicker.

The only downer is that these DIMMs are quite tall at 51mm, so you’ll want to measure up the area around your memory slots before you buy them, to make sure they won’t clash with a CPU cooler fan, or the radiator for your AIO cooler if it’s mounted in the roof of your PC case. If you have an AMD Socket AM4 rig with just 16GB of RAM, this memory offers an affordable upgrade to 32GB that also looks good.

Read our full Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4 review.

We’ve built a number of gaming rigs for our build features with Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM, simply because it’s affordable, reliable, and it also has a seriously low profile. With a module height of just 34mm (or 33.5mm to be precise), you should have no trouble squeezing this memory under an overhanging fan on your CPU cooler

There’s no RGB lighting, but if you don’t care for big light shows behind tempered glass panels, then that’s not important. What is important is that these short modules are compatible with a wide range of the best gaming PC systems from the last few years, and they also perform well. 

We can attest to both these facts from our testing, and unlike some budget memory, these aren’t bare PCBs either, with Corsair’s black heatsinks looking minimally stylish, and you can get them in white as well. A wide range of speeds are available, with specs now going all the way up to 4,000MHz kits, with C18 latency timings. 

We recommend going for 3,600MHz dual-channel 32GB (2 x 16GB) kit as the sweet spot right now, giving you a dirt-cheap upgrade for an aging AMD Socket AM4 or non-DDR5 Intel system. With their short height, these LPX modules are also ideal for upgrading a mini gaming PC, as long as it uses DDR4 memory.