Overclocker hits DDR5-12054 on pure air cooling — DDR5-8000 RAM maxed out without exotic cooling

Earlier this morning, G.Skill shared that its RAM had again been used to reach world record-breaking frequencies while specifically air-cooled by “saltycroissant,” a Canadian overclocker. Another overclocker, “speed.fastest,” achieved a slightly lower DDR5-12052 with air cooling.

Both overclockers used G.Skill’s high-performance Trident ZS DDR5-8000 48GB (2x24GB) CL38 (F5-8000J3848F24GX20-TZ5K) memory to achieve the new memory overclocking records. The advertised memory kit is rated for DDR5-8000 CL38-48-48-128 at 1.35V, and the fact that the overclockers pushed it by over 50% — particularly considering the feats didn’t involve exotic cooling, such as liquid nitrogen or dry ice.

Now the motherboards in question did need to be reasonably high-end to permit this— saltycroissant used an ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF, while speed.fastest used ASUS ROG Maximum Z890 Apex— which starts at roughly $525 and $713 on Amazon at the time of writing, respectively. These incredibly premium motherboards are designed with the best components on the market because they are tailored to overclockers.

In any case, 2025 is sure off to a good start for G.Skill and the community of RAM overclockers who enjoy buying its kit. Just 10 days ago, we also reported on G.Skill RAM used for DDR5-10600 and CSODIMM DDR5-8155 and even had Allen “Splave” Golibersuch showcase in a feature how he overclocked Arrow Lake RAM as high as 12,666 four days later.

With even consumer DDR5 RAM continuously getting pushed farther and farther and DDR6 on the distant horizon, RAM overclockers will continue increasing this number in the coming years. It’ll be exciting to see DDR5’s ceiling as 20,000 MT/s seems a bit out of reach— maybe not until DDR6, but almost certainly within its ranges if the overclocking performance of DDR5 so far is any indication. Of course, only time will tell— maybe we’ll somehow end up waiting over ten years for another 10,000 MT/s bump in maximum RAM throughput, but I highly doubt that, considering how much it climbs with each generation.