DDR4 CL14 still beats DDR5 CL28 for Factorio.

Yes, DDR4’s tighter CL14 has lower absolute latency than DDR5’s CL28, so for CPU-bound games like Factorio, DDR4 is still the latency king.

CL numbers are cycles, not nanoseconds. A DDR4-3600 CL14 kit has a true latency of about 7.8 ns. A DDR5-6000 CL28 kit comes in at roughly 9.3 ns. That’s 20% worse. Factorio’s simulation loop is all about waiting on memory — bandwidth doesn’t help, latency does. So DDR4 wins there.

That gap shrinks with faster DDR5 (e.g., 6400 CL28 is ~8.75 ns), but it’s still behind. If you’re building strictly for Factorio or other latency-hungry games, DDR4 is the smarter choice. DDR5’s bandwidth advantage is real for rendering or data work, but not here.

Don’t overthink it — if you’re on DDR4, this is one of the few cases where upgrading to DDR5 might actually hurt performance in your main game.