Comment by zamadatix
Even 6000 MHz isn't necessarily "cheap low speed" RAM though, it's still a 400 MHz OC on Zen 5/14th Gen. ~$44 gets you 2x8 GB 4800 but it's ~$63 to start with 2x8 GB 6000.
Simplifying it to one vendor for the sake of conversations: for boards that explicitly target 9800X OCing users it's a bit silly to see 4 slots all the time but for the majority of boards that target the whole lineup it's not nearly as silly. Same for the 9900/9950X class where a lot of the users might be intentionally looking for larger amounts of slow RAM for heavier applications, not necessarily the absolute best bandwidth or latency the processor can manage.
> Even 6000 MHz isn't necessarily "cheap low speed" RAM though, it's still a 400 MHz OC on Zen 5/14th Gen. ~$44 gets you 2x8 GB 4800 but it's ~$63 to start with 2x8 GB 6000.
I'd argue that whatever JEDEC specs intel/AMD puts up are mostly irrelevant to the reality of things, and the upgrade minded people won't be limiting speeds because of their speculative future scenario. This only leaves people who are on a very constrained budget and can't buy all the RAM at once. And they could buy a single 16GB stick and then buy another one later on when necessary. The losses from only using one channel aren't going to be as pronounced as on DDR4 either because of the 8GB's halved bangrkups and DDR5's internal channel split.
> Same for the 9900/9950X class where a lot of the users might be intentionally looking for larger amounts of slow RAM for heavier applications, not necessarily the absolute best bandwidth or latency the processor can manage.
I think DDR5 changes things up a bit here as 64GB is currently easily used and is enough for most, even heavier, workloads. Like for example for HN's audience some programming without worrying about memory being eaten up outside some more extreme cases. I agree that there's still a lot of people who'd need the ram even accounting for that, but they don't exactly need 80% of boards to have 4 slots