ASUS And G.Skill Shove Adata And Gigabyte Aside To Claim A DDR5 Speed Record
As any sports athlete can attest, records are meant to be broken. For example, the Boston Celtics are coming off an historic NBA season in which the team claimed the most three-pointers ever in a single season, draining a staggering 1,370 shots from beyond the arc. The same concept applies to tech, as evidenced by yet another DDR5 frequency record.
Also a team effort, G.Skill and ASUS joined forces to set a smoking-fast new DDR5 frequency record at DDR5-12772, with renowned overclocker Seby running point. SK hynix gets a shout-out in the announcement too, because the Trident Z5 DDR5 memory used to achieve a record speed is built around the company's binned memory chips. Intel was also riding shotgun.
That's just enough to edge out the previous DDR5-12762 record achieved by HiCookie using a kit of Adata's XPG memory installed in a Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Tachyon Ice motherboard.
"This incredible frequency record was achieved with G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 memory, built with high-performance SK hynix DDR5 ICs, running on the ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K desktop processor under extreme liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling," G.Skill states in a press release.
As is almost always the case, there are notable caveats. The use of LN2 cooling is one them. Due to the nature and cost of LN2, it's reserved in the tech space for record overclocking attempts and not at all suitable for everyday use.
Secondly, while one of G.Skill's stock photos (up top) shows a pair of Trident Z5 memory modules sitting pretty in an ASUS motherboard, the new record frequency (which is validated at HWBOT) was actually achieved on a single module (model F5-8000J3848F24GX2-Tz5K), which means forgoing any benefits for running memory in a dual-channel configuration.
Not that it really matters, as this sort of thing is more of a sport for enthusiasts than anything else. Speed records are always fun, regardless of feasibility in the real world. And in this case, these memory speed records continue to underscore the potential of DDR5 memory.
We're still waiting for memory makers to reach the DDR5-10000 threshold for a retail kit using air cooling. They're not there yet, but have come awfully close—the fastest memory available at retail are a pair of G.Skill 48GB (2x48GB) Trident Z5 DDR5-9000 memory kits, both of which can be found on Newegg. On Amazon, the fastest memory kits are a spattering of DDR5-8800 models from the likes of G.Skill, Supermicro, and V-Color.
