MSI And Kingston Go After DDR5 Overclocking Crown With A Fury And Set A New Record
At some point, we'll have to scale back our coverage of a high-tech game of leapfrog involving two notable hardware teams—ASUS paired with G.Skill, and MSI teamed with Kingston. Both sets have joined forces with professional overclockers to claim (and reclaim) DDR5 speed records, with the new speed to beat set at DDR5-12196.
That's good for the top spot on HWBOT and it comes less than a week after professional overclocker 'safedisk' set the record at DDR5-12112 using a kit of G.Skill RAM installed in an ASUS motherboard.
"Breaking records with next-level overclocking! The
@kingstontech
memories pairs with MSI’s advanced Z890 motherboard to push performance to new heights. DRAM Frequency now reaching an impressive 12196 MT/s!," MSI bragged on X/Twitter after reclaiming the crown.
Overclocker Kovan Yang achieved the record speed using a single 24GB module of Kingston's Fury Renegade RAM, hitting 6,098MHz (rounded up from 6,097.6MHz) with timings loosened to 48-120-120-127 in MSI's MEG Z890 Unify-X motherboard. Intel's Core Ultra 7 265K processor based on Arrow Lake sat shotgun for the record run.
As with previous DDR5 records, Yang turned to liquid nitrogen to achieve the DDR5 frequency world record. The use of LN2 underscores that we're not quite at the point where such fast speeds can be obtained and maintained on air cooling, though for how long remains to be seen.
Like we've written about before, the advent of CUDIMMs, or Clock Unbuffered Dual Inline Memory Modules, is a game changer for higher speeds. CUDIMMS employ a clock driver IC directly on the module, which provides a more stable signal enabling faster speeds.
Due to this, G.Skill was recently able to introduce a blazing-fast Trident Z5 CK DDR5-9600 memory kit that can hit that speed with air cooling. That currently ranks as the fastest retail DDR5 memory. It will be interesting to see if G.Skill can also win the race to DDR5-10000, or if Kingston or perhaps Corsair beats the company to the punch. While we wait, brace yourself for more DDR5 overclocking records.
