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A person inserts Kingston FURY modules into a motherboard installed in a white computer case.

Overclocking memory for Adobe applications

Oct 2023
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Overclocking memory has traditionally been limited to PCs and laptops, with the primary intent to improve the gaming experience. But can non-gaming applications also benefit from overclocked memory? Professional creative bundles like Adobe Creative Cloud are well known to require and utilise higher memory capacities. In this article, we set out to test if higher memory clock speeds and lower latencies could also improve application performance for the non-gaming user.

To prove our theory, we used Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 and Renegade DDR5 kits in speeds ranging from 4800MT/s to 7200MT/s, and in dual channel kits of 32GB and 64GB total memory, populated in 1DPC (1 DIMM per channel) configuration for the best performance:

Product lineCapacity/speed/timingsPart number


Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 RGB		 32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-7200 CL38-44-44 KF572C38RSAK2-32
32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-6800 CL36-42-42 KF568C36RSAK2-32
32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-6400 CL32-39-39 KF564C32RSAK2-32

Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 RGB




 64GB (kit of 2) DDR5-5600 CL40-40-40 KF556C40BBAK2-64
32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-5600 CL40-40-40 KF556C40BBAK2-32
64GB (kit of 2) DDR5-5200 CL40-40-40 KF552C40BBAK2-64
32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-5200 CL40-40-40 KF552C40BBAK2-32
64GB (kit of 2) DDR5-4800 CL38-38-38 KF548C38BBAK2-64
32GB (kit of 2) DDR5-4800 CL38-38-38 KF548C38BBAK2-32

The Adobe Creative Cloud logo, a rainbow gradient with two stylized chain links, shaped like the letter C, outlined in white interlocking.

Note: RGB parts can be substituted for non-RGB options with the same results, as can alternate heat spreader colours (white, black, silver) at the same speed and timings.

Our test platform consisted of the following configuration:
CPU: Intel Core i7 13700K
Motherboard: MSI Z790 MPG Carbon WIFI
Graphics: ASUS TUF RTX 3070
Storage: Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB NVMe SSD

Our friends at Puget Systems have compiled a fantastic real-world benchmark application called PugetBench, which we used to measure the memory performance with three Adobe® applications: Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Photoshop

Photoshop was the most RAM intensive of the three, with this test using more than 32GB of system RAM. For the 32GB tests, this meant a percentage of the physical RAM needs were met by using virtual memory, which is a Windows pagefile cached on storage (the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB NVMe SSD in this case). As we increased memory speed, we observed that the scores also increased. From 4800MT/s to 7200MT/s, the increase in score was 4.9%.

Moving from 32GB to 64GB (again, as one dual channel kit in 1DPC configuration), each speed surpassed its 32GB counterpart, proving physical RAM needs were being met without having to use virtual memory. With 4800MT/s and 5200MT/s scores being close, 5600MT/s had a significant jump by 3.3%.

A chart with 7 different FURY DDR5 memory speeds in 64GB and 32GB capacities and its performance with Adobe Photoshop.

Premiere Pro

Next, we ran Premiere Pro. This video editing program is GPU intensive, but still recommends 16GB of system memory. With 32GB kits installed, the entry line Beast ranging from 4800MT/s to 6000MT/s saw a larger increase than with the high-performance Renegade kits ranging from 6400MT/s to 7200MT/s. Overall, 4800MT/s to 7200MT/s yielded a score increase of 3.7%.

Similar to Photoshop, with 64GB kits installed the speed increases scored higher than their 32GB equivalents, proving once again that more memory is better for these types of applications. 4800MT/s scored one point higher than 5200MT/s while 5600MT/s scored eleven points higher, a difference of 1.2%.

A chart with 7 different FURY DDR5 memory speeds in 64GB and 32GB capacities and its performance with Adobe Premiere Pro.

After Effects

The last benchmark was After Effects. Adobe recommends 32GB minimum memory, which demonstrated decent increases in scores and performance as we scaled up speed.  Notably, increasing the memory capacity made the most difference.

The results of our PugetBench benchmarks demonstrate RAM speed does boost performance for productivity apps. More importantly, the scores reflect that performance also dramatically increases with a doubling of the memory capacity from 32GB to 64GB on applications that are RAM memory bound.

A chart with 7 different FURY DDR5 memory speeds in 64GB and 32GB capacities and its performance with Adobe After Effects.

Kingston FURY overclockable memory isn’t just for gamers. It’s our performance solution for users looking to get the most out of their applications, regardless of use-case. Take a look at what options we recommend for your system with our Configurator or you can check out our Kingston FURY product lineup.

#KingstonIsWithYou #KingstonFURY

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