Very fast memory doesn’t make much sense on a Ryzen 3000 CPUĪs we mentioned above when looking at the latency results, we see one of the quirks of AMD Matisse CPUs reveal itself above DDR4-3600. If you shift to 1080p at maximum settings, you are presented with more of a graphics bottleneck, and at 4K at maximum settings, even an RTX 2080 Ti can and does struggle to put out playable frame rates in some titles. A fast CPU-and as we’ll see-quality memory are also necessary. If you’re gaming at 120 fps and higher, you need more than a powerful GPU. This covers a good chunk of use cases.ġ080p results at low settings give good information for gamers using high refresh rate monitors. We’ve tested at 3 different settings: 1080p at low settings, 1080p at maximum settings and 4K at maximum settings.

Samsung 860 Pro 1TB (OS) & Western Digital Black SN750 1TB (Games) It’s impressive, sure, but it’s unlikely to represent very good value for money – you’ll only fill it with current-generation technology if you go a long time between offloading your footage, and the idea of having 1TB of potentially priceless footage on a single card makes us go a bit weak at the knees.Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition What’s the biggest you can go? Lexar now makes a 1TB SD card, which is bigger than you’ll find on many laptops with solid state storage. We wouldn’t look at anything smaller than 128GB, with 256GB probably more practical if you don’t want to have to offload your footage and back it up every night or two when you’re away from home. If you’re a videographer, you’ll need more, especially if you shoot in 4K. If you shoot video, a card that can hold around an hour of good-quality film from your camera will probably suffice.

You’re aiming for a sweet spot here – a card that won’t run out of space just as things get interesting, but that will force you to offload and backup images with relative frequency. If you shoot less frequently, a card that can accommodate 1,000 images is probably enough. If you’re a really keen snapper, you should aim for a card that will store between 1,500 and 2,000 images from whatever camera you currently own. The longer answer is that the size of the card depends on what kind of photographer. And this brings us to our first acronym – all cards with a capacity of 32GB and under fall into the SDHC camp, while cards sized at 64GB and over are classed as SDXC. How big should your memory card be? For most people, a 32GB card is the smallest one you should consider, with 64GB likely to be the better option.

Best memory cards for gaming