Overclocker Toppc Reaches 6GHz With G.SKILL Trident Z Royal Memory

Overclocking records are broken all of the time, so it’s rare when a new result manages to grab more than the usual amount of attention. If you’re an overclocker who’s managed to breach a long-targeted clock speed, such as 6GHz on memory, that’s an example of a result that will definitely stand out.

We don’t keep on top of every record that’s broken, but when it comes to memory, it seems like G.SKILL’s name is often at the forefront, and this time is no exception. Overclocker Toppc took the company’s Trident Z Royal memory and hit a peak DDR clock speed of 6,016.8MHz. If we ignore double-data rate math and use the effective 3,008.4MHz clock speed, that’s still a new GHz level breached.

As with many extreme memory overclocks, this one was conducted using a single stick of memory. Where this overclock may differ from most is with the motherboard used. Instead of a full-blown eATX form-factor board designed entirely around overclocking, it was MSI’s ITX-sized MPG Z390I GAMING EDGE AC that helped get the job done.

The CPU-Z validation page for this overclock highlights a few other sacrifices that had to be made in order to achieve such a high clock. Whereas the DDR4-3200 memory kits used in our test platforms are spec’d with 14-14-14 timings, Toppc had to loosen this G.SKILL Trident Z stick to 31-63-63!

What’s humorous about this configuration of timings and speeds is that this resulting overclock has slightly worse latency than those same DDR4-3200 CL14 kits we use in our test machines (which also happen to be G.SKILL, come to think of it). Those calculate to 8.75 nanoseconds latency (14 / (3200 / 2) * 1000), whereas CL31 at DDR4-6008 is 10.3 ns. Of course, none of this matters when overclocking records are the only target, but that math should make you feel a little bit better about that modest DDR4 kit in your own PC!