Sticking two fingers up at the economy, Biwin’s new Origin Code memory sticks are as extreme as you could imagine, with up to 256 GB of DDR5-8000 CL42

If you were hoping that memory vendors would offer some relief from the RAMpocalypse at this year’s Computex, then I have some good news and bad news for you. Biwin has a new memory brand and a magnificent range of DDR5 kits heading our way, but with the biggest kit comparable to an RTX 5090 on price, few of us will get the chance to enjoy them.

Our two hardware editors, Dave and Jacob, are currently battling through the crowds at the annual tech-splurge event, and at a time when I was probably fast asleep, they were checking out Biwin’s stand, replete with a host of DRAM goodies. The China-based company has been producing memory and storage solutions since 2010, so while its name might not be super familiar to PC gamers, it does make stuff for other brands, such as Acer, HP, and Lenovo.

Anyway, it turns out that not only does it have a new memory brand, Origin Code, it also has a series of DDR5 kits that are very much an anachronism in today’s memory-mangled market.

At the top of the range is a 256 GB kit of dual-channel DDR5-8000 CL42 CQDIMMs, which look somewhat understated in design, but stuffed into any Arrow Lake rig, they’d banish any concerns of running out of memory. Last year, I reviewed a 128 GB Crucial CUDIMM kit, which was rated to DDR5-6400 CL52, so we’re looking at a substantial improvement in transfer rate and memory timings.

For the PC gamer who simply must have a maxed-out, loaded-to-the-hilt rig, you couldn’t ask for anything better. Well, maybe one thing, and that’s the small matter of the price tag. Apparently, it will cost somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000.

If, for some unfathomable reason, that’s just a wee bit too expensive for your tastes, then you could always pick one of Origin Code’s more ‘normal’ DDR5 kits. For example, it has multiple sets that comply with AMD’s new EXPO ULL standard. They’re all sporting a CAS latency of 26 cycles and range from 32 GB DDR5-6200 (no, that’s not a typo) up to 96 GB DDR5-6000.

However, there’s absolutely no guarantee that your gaming PC will be happy to run with DRAM timings that tight. In fact, Biwin itself couldn’t get its test platform (AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Dark Hero) to go that low, bottoming out at CL28. The same was true of the 256 GB CQDIMM setup, with the platform only managing CL64, despite the CL42 rating of each module.

So unless you have a super-stable PC, the best latencies might be out of reach, making the DRAM kit somewhat pointless. Admittedly, motherboard vendors may come to the rescue with appropriate BIOS updates, but even then, there’s the small matter of having the money to purchase such a DRAM kit in the first place.

I don’t know what the smaller/slowest DDR5 sets are being targeted at, price-wise, but given that the cheapest 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit I’ve seen of late is $380, you just know that the Origin Code stuff is going to be very pricey. But hey, at least you get a funky DRAM cooler in the box with some of the kits, so that’s something, right?