Anyone who has ever purchased a set of high-quality DDR5 memory knows how difficult it is to obtain. And even if you can find a kit in stock, it is ridiculously expensive. At this point, we know that packs like this delicious Teamgroup 6400MHz kit are overpriced and not cost-effective, but that won't always be the case. In six months, maybe, just maybe, we'll find a good, affordable 6000MHz+ in stock. And there are few kits better than the Teamgroup T-Force Delta DDR5-6400 RGB.

The DDR5 memory supply issues are related to a shortage of power management components; GPUs have demand issues, which exacerbate the supply shortage; for DDR5, supply will certainly improve throughout 2022; and the DDR5 memory supply is likely to be a problem for the next few years.

Rather than talk about supply issues this way and that, let's focus on the kit itself. I hope that in the coming months such kits will not cost more than the current decent DDR4-3600 kits. Onward Ho

The Teamgroup Delta RGB kit has an unabashedly premium look to match its high-end specifications and performance; it is one of the fastest kits on the market rated DDR5-6400; it is a 2x16GB kit with primary timing of 40-40 40-84, 1.35 V, and comes with a limited lifetime warranty. In other words, it's a kit that will last for years to come. [But the Team Delta RGB kit and its diffused RGB lighting look great. Its opaque cover gives a nice, unobtrusive impression. Especially at night, it is preferable to overly bright LEDs that feel like lasers that pierce your retinas.

However, this is a tall kit, so you need to make sure the cooler fits its height and doesn't tower over the motherboard's DIMM slots. The module itself is solidly built, with heavy heat spreaders and good cooling potential. Some of the silkscreening may be a bit over the top, but you will never see it after installation.

But it's what's under the hood that matters. The kit includes memory ICs from SK Hynix, which are known to scale much faster than those from Micron and possibly Samsung. Hynix is also included in the memory QVL list on most motherboards and is widely supported. For some reason Samsung is not as widely supported, but is catching up with each new motherboard BIOS.

Entry-level DDR5 is less impressive due to its high timing and resulting latency drawbacks; the Team kit almost completely overcomes this drawback and is roughly equivalent to the DDR4-3600 C16 kit. We recently reviewed G.Skill's Trident Z5 DDR5-6000 C36 kit, which is a good competitor to the Team kit.

With the default XMP 3.0 settings, it is a tough battle between the raw bandwidth of the Team kit and the slower but lower latency of the G.Skill kit. Unless you only use applications that respond to raw megahertz, I think the G.Skill kit wins hands down. In the end, the choice will come down to availability and which kit looks better.

Armed with a new BIOS and more adventurous voltage settings, we revisited overclocking with the Team Delta kit and the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex, and were able to hit DDR5-6667 at 1.43V with the C36-38-38 and the AIDA64 It passed the memory and cache tests; 1.43V is not that excessive a voltage, and this kit may have some headroom in terms of clocks, tight timing, etc. However, we were happy with this overclocking as we had to raise the IMC voltage to a level above the 24/7 safe level and called it a day before anything untoward happened.

Before reaching any final conclusions, we can't resist mentioning a bit about pricing and availability: we checked directly with Team about availability, and unfortunately, as of this writing, the product is not available worldwide. In fact, sites like Newegg and Amazon don't even include prices in their listings due to the volatile market. I know that they will be as expensive as the current DDR5 kits - I've seen figures as high as $600 or 600 pounds - but I'm sure they won't stay that way. Let's always keep checking. You might find a bargain soon.

Price aside, the Team Delta RGB kit impressed us - it's fast enough to overcome the latency drawbacks of DDR5, and at 6400MHz, it delivers impressive performance in bandwidth-hungry applications. Importantly, it outperforms the DDR4-3600 C16 kit in gaming. Combine this with a Core i9 12900K and a GeForce RTX 3080 and you have a very expensive but very fast system.

We like its great looks and build quality, and it has overclocking headroom on top of its already high speed. With a better CPU memory controller and more liberal voltage settings, we think 7000 MHz could be achieved, and possibly more as the DDR5 ecosystem matures. But price and availability looms like a dark cloud, and I think we'll have to re-evaluate in 6 months, by which time the Team Delta DDR5-6400 kit will be much more attractive.