Patriot
DDR4 · 3600 MT/s · CL18 · 2×16GB
Lowest price in GB across retailers
There's a second Viper Steel tier a notch above the 3200 line: DDR4-3600, again split between two CL grades — 18 and 20 — rather than a single fixed timing.
At 3600 MT/s CL18, this 2×16GB kit sits in a family running from 16GB up to 64GB, the same capacity spread as Patriot's slower Viper Steel line but at the higher clock. Because both CL18 and CL20 versions carry the same 3600 name, confirm the timing printed on the specific listing rather than assuming it matches a different kit at the same capacity.
This is unbuffered UDIMM DDR4 for standard desktop boards, not for systems needing registered or ECC modules.
Vengeance LPX earns its long shelf life through breadth and a low-profile heatspreader, not through any single standout spec — the timing bin on the specific listing is what actually decides whether a given kit is a good buy.
DDR5 doubled the bandwidth and moved power regulation onto the module. Whether that is worth paying for depends entirely on which platform you are building.
A dying memory generation does not get cheaper on its way out — it gets more expensive, because the economics of end-of-life manufacturing are the opposite of the economics of a maturing one.
16 GB is no longer comfortable, 32 GB is the sensible default, and 64 GB is a workload decision rather than a future-proofing one.
Capacity avoids stutter caused by running out of memory; speed affects how efficiently the CPU feeds data to the GPU. They solve different problems, and buying enough of the first one before spending on the second is the right order.
A 2x16GB kit sits at the highest-volume point on the memory market, and volume is what actually sets price per gigabyte — not capacity, and not how new a kit's specification is.