G.Skill And ASUS Hit DDR5-12112 To Reclaim Memory Overclocking Record
It's often said in sports that records are meant to be broken, and sometimes it can take years or even decades for it to happen. In the sport of professional overclocking, however, no such long waits are required, at least with regards to DDR5 memory frequencies. To wit, G.Skill and ASUS just snatched the overclocking world record from rivals Kingston and MSI.
The new top DDR5 memory frequency to beat is 12,112MHz (technically MT/s, or mega-transfers per second), which overclocker 'Safedisk' achieved with a kit of G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5 memory installed into an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard, alongside Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K processor. It's an official record, too.
"The record-breaking achievement of DDR5-12112 demonstrates the exceptional memory overclocking performance of the latest Intel Core™ Ultra 200 K-series desktop processors, Z890 motherboards, and G.Skill DDR5 memory. The overclock record has been submitted to HWBOT and CPU-Z," G.Skill points out in a press release.
Earlier this week, Kingston and MSI held the top spot and accompanying bragging rights at DDR5-12108, achieved by overclocker Kovan Yang. That entry is now the second-fastest DDR5 frequency ever reached, with G.Skill and ASUS inching just slightly ahead to reclaim the overclocking crown. So it goes with this sort of thing, which is kind of reminiscent of Olympic races where the winner is sometimes determined by mere fractions of a second.
The caveat to all this is that these extreme speeds are being accomplished with liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling. That's not exactly a sustainable or feasible cooling method for anything outside of professional overclocking attempts.
That said, the introduction of CUDIMMs, or Clock Unbuffered Dual Inline Memory Modules with a tiny integrated circuit (IC) directly on the printed circuit board (PCB) is proving to be a game-changer for high frequencies. The little chip serves as a clock driver (CKD), generating signals for the memory. The upshot to its placement on the PCB is better stability to make faster speeds more easily attainable.
G.Skill's already announced a 48GB (2x24GB) kit of DDR5-9600 that can achieve that speed on air cooling, and we highly suspect it won't be long before we see the first retail kits sporting DDR5-10000 speeds or even higher.
