G.Skill DDR5 RAM is overclocked to a blazing 12,054MT/s with no liquid nitrogen needed – just air cooling

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• G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 was overclocked to 6027MHz or 12,054MT/s
• That was achieved using just air cooling, with no need for liquid nitrogen
• There is, however, a catch (of sorts) in how the CPU was configured

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G.Skill has again been setting records with its DDR5 RAM, this time with a seriously impressive overclock that doesn’t use any exotic cooling.

This feat was achieved using G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 by an expert overclocker from Indonesia, a certain ‘speed.fastest,’ who managed to crank the RAM up to 6027MHz (or 12,054MT/s).

That isn’t a DDR5 world record, going by HWBot’s rankings – in fact it’s 16th place in the global rankings (at the time of writing) – but all the faster speeds attained used the likes of liquid nitrogen cooling.

The key point here is that just air cooling was used, with a fan pointing at the memory (and water cooling for the CPU). In other words, this was a normal PC (well, almost – it was normal in terms of the components, but not the configuration, and we’ll come back to that in a moment).

As G.Skill tells us: “Previously, reaching the DDR5-12000 milestone required a more extreme cooling method, such as liquid nitrogen or dry ice. These incredible achievements with air cooling demonstrate the amazing overclock potential of modern hardware.”

The record was achieved with a single 24GB stick of RAM from a Trident Z5 DDR5-8000 CL38 2 x 24GB kit. Speed.fastest ran that memory module in a PC with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor and an Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard.

A separate attempt from another overclocker, this time it was ‘saltycroissant’ based in Canada, reached 12,050MT/s, again on air cooling, with the same RAM module (in an ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF motherboard this time).

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Analysis: Still impractical, but very cool

In case you were thinking of trying this at home, or getting somewhere up towards this level, as VideoCardz points out, while this is air cooling and nothing fancy is used to juice up the DDR5 to incredible speeds, there is a catch. Namely that the CPU is running just a single core at 400MHz, which obviously wouldn’t be any good in any real-world use scenario.

So, while there’s no exotic cooling needed, this still remains an achievement which isn’t useful in a practical sense – save for showing the general overclocking potential of DDR5 in an Arrow Lake system, which remains seriously impressive. Team Blue certainly has a win on its hands in that respect, even if the Arrow Lake launch has been, shall we say, less than ideal (especially given the backdrop of previous-gen instability issues).

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