Talk about a literally cold move. Barely a week after Patriot Memory and Gigabyte tag teamed a
DDR5 world overclocking record at 13,211.4 MT/s (6,605.7 MHz), G.Skill and ASUS said, 'Hold our beer' and stole the speed crown in collaboration with professional overclocker CENS, who employed frigid liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling to blow past the previous mark and set a new one at 13,322.8 MT/s (6,661.4 MHz).
This is how it goes in the overclocking scene. Looking at the top validated rankings on HWBOT, the primary players on the memory side are Adata, Corsair, G.Skill, and Patriot, all of which hold multiple spots in the top 20 speed rankings. If expanding list to the top 40 (two pages of results), you can add Acer and V-Color to the mix as well.
Source: CENS via HWBOT
As is typically the case, caveats abound. The main one is that professional overclockers often turn to exotic cooling like LN2 to set world records. Beyond the cost, this matters because LN2 is not a feasible cooling solution for long term runs or typically home settings. While far from a perfect analogy, you can think of it like ultra-high octane racing fuel, in the sense that it's expensive and not suitable for your daily driver.
The other big caveat is that record breaking speeds are often obtained on single modules and not dual or quad module kits. In this case, CENS achieved the record speed using a single G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 memory module, albeit a high capacity one at 24GB.
Other parts of the open air setup included an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard and
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor based on Arrow Lake.
"This incredible achievement pushes the boundaries of DDR5 speed once again. Over the past few weeks, multiple DDR5 memory overclock frequency scores have surpassed the DDR5-13000 barrier. The overclocking community continues to push the limits of the latest PC hardware through precision tuning. G.Skill is excited to witness extreme overclockers from around the world continue to challenge limits and deliver new extraordinary results,"
G.Skill said.