Toppc Breaks DRAM Overclocking World Record After Pushing G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Module To DDR4-5500

Something that wasn’t hard to find at last week’s Computex event was super-fast RAM. It was all over the place, and what was there was downright impressive. I wrote last week about a cool showing at the Corsair suite, where I saw 8x16GB Vengeance modules running at a ridiculous DDR4-3800. For smaller kits of memory, those speeds are not too rare, but they’re unknowns on 16GB modules in a set of 8.

At some point after writing that post, I stumbled on another kit of memory running at DDR4-4800, and while it was only 16GB (4x4GB), the result was still notable. World records in the past year have exceeded 5GHz, however, so I had to ask myself an obvious question: “When will we see 5.5GHz, or even 6GHz?”

Thanks to Toppc, we have an answer for the first one. Yesterday, the Taiwanese overclocker managed to hit an exact 2750MHz clock rate with his overclock, giving us an effective speed of DDR4-5500, or 5.5GHz. As with most DRAM world record overclocks, this one was accomplished with one module, and with all but one CPU core disabled. It’s not clear how much voltage was required.

Overclocks like these are not just proof of there being some really quality memory ICs from Samsung, but also the fact that overclocking on Intel’s new X299 platform is an absolute dream. The aforementioned Corsair PC that featured 128GB running at DDR4-3800 was also done on an X299 machine. In Toppc’s case, the board chosen to accomplish his overclock was MSI’s X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC. It’ll be interesting after Intel’s Core X series processors get released to see just how high these DDR4 clocks can go.