Over the past few months, overclockers have come tantalizing close to overclocking DDR4 RAM to 6GHz, but nobody's quite been able to get there. Well, until now. The new world record for the fastest memory frequency now sits at just over 6GHz (6,016.8MHz, to be precise). And technically, it's really 6016.8 MT/s, with a base clock running half that speed, but let's not get too hung up on semantics.
It comes as no surprise that an overclocker achieved the feat using G.Skill memory, and specifically with an 8GB Trident Z Royal module (some of the best RAM available). Of the top 20 fastest DDR4 frequencies validated at HWBot, G.Skill accounts for at least 15 of them, and possibly more, as there are two unlabeled entries.
"Achieving DDR4-6000MHz has been our goal for quite some time, and we are extremely excited to be able to achieve this major milestone together with MSI," said Tequila Huang, corporate vice president at G.Skill.
Renowned overclocker Toppc achieved the 6GHz overclock using an MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC motherboard with a Core i9-9900K processor installed. As is commonly the case with these sort of things, the extreme overclock required liquid nitrogen to keep the modules nice and chilly.
It's highly unlikely we will ever see a DDR4 RAM kit hit 6GHz without the benefit of LN2, though 5GHz is a possibility—the Trident Z Royal line is already offered in kits of up to DDR4-4800.
Now the question is, how much further can overclockers go with DDR4? If I had to guess, I'd say around 6,500MHz is the ceiling, and I'm not sure that is realistically attainable. We'll probably need DDR5 to break the 10GHz barrier for system memory, which we still don't have outside of GPUs.
