Asus is celebrating 20 years of its ROG gaming brand at the moment, and during an in-person ROG Day event in China, it has unveiled its first-ever ROG-branded DDR5 RAM kit. In usual circumstances, a new brand entering the best RAM for gaming arena would be cause for celebration, but beyond the ROG anniversary, it's hard to ignore the truly awful timing for the brand's latest launch.
To be clear, the new ROG RAM kit isn't being manufactured by Asus in a homemade fab, but it's the first ROG-branded memory kit to bear the company's own design and logos, and be sold directly from Asus. By all accounts, the new memory kit has been developed in partnership with BIWIN and uses SK Hynix memory.
One of the Asus ROG-certified partners is the maker of our go-to budget DDR5 RAM. While it's hard to argue it's budget-friendly right now, T-Force Delta RGB DDR5 is currently about half the price of the new ROG RAM.
T-Force Delta RGB DDR5: $429 at Newegg
It's unclear in what kind of supply the ROG 20th Anniversary RAM kit will be available in, especially with ongoing RAM shortages at the moment due to never-before-seen manufacturing demands from AI companies. It's also unclear what range of speeds and capacities Asus will make available. From the teaser images shown, it looks like the initial batch will be enthusiast-grade and won't exactly be the most affordable memory on the shelves.
To wit, Asus has shown off a 48GB (2x 24GB) kit that's clocked at 6000MT/s, with timings of CLS26-36-36-76. The sticks sport a black, gold, and red design that appears to have some RGB arrays within. As you can imagine, at a time like this, RAM of this sort of capacity, speed, and likely rarity, will not come cheap. Asus has announced that it will retail for $880.
The Asus ROG RAM will have both Intel overclocking compatibility (XMP and EXPO), but interestingly, a specialized ROG mode will allow users with an Asus ROG motherboard to unlock even greater performance. It'll apparently work like activating an XMP or EXPO profile with a simple one-click overclocking menu in your BIOS, and it'll boost the RAM performance up to DDR5-8000. That's a pretty hefty overclock, but it's most likely possible due to the SK Hynix M-die circuitry used.
The addition of a ROG mode does make me think a slide into the RAM market from Asus is to further expand its hold over the wider gaming PC building market, but also because of the brand's prebuilt gaming PC and laptop offerings. If it can offer a system that's not beholden to second-party memory, it will have better control over its own inventory and spec sheets, not to mention it can offer a gaming PC with almost entirely Asus-made components (minus the CPU and SSD).
That said, Asus has also launched the ROG certified program, which identifies partnerships the company has with other memory sellers. "The ROG Certified Program highlights select high-performance memory modules that ROG engineers have subjected to rigorous testing and validation to confirm compatibility with ROG motherboards", says a statement on the ROG website.
"Through close collaboration with trusted hardware partners, only products that meet ROG's strict standards for quality, performance, and stability earn the ROG Certified designation. This gives gamers and PC builders greater confidence that their components will work together smoothly to deliver a reliable and optimized ROG experience."
The list of 14 RAM makers includes names like Corsair, Klevv, XPG, Kingston Fury, T-Force, Lexar, and G.Skill, and it'll be interesting to see if that list grows in the coming years as all of these companies try to navigate a very tough consumer sector.
For more on PC components, check out the best CPU for gaming, the best graphics card, and the best SSD for gaming.
