MSI had to sacrifice everything to hit this 10,004MT/s DDR5 RAM overclock

(Image credit: MSI, Kingston)

MSI's own overclocking team has managed to push a single stick of DDR5 over the 5,000MHz barrier to set a new record for RAM overclocking. The team used the company's MEG Z690 Unify-X motherboard to push a single stick of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-4800 RAM to 5001.8MHz to give an effective transfer rate of 10,004MT/s. MSI says it hit 10,004MHz, which is technically incorrect but effectively spot on due to how double data rate RAM works.

⚡⚡An amazing overclocking milestone for DDR5 memory frequency has just been achieved by our OC team! 👏-Model: MEG Z690 UNIFY-X-Memory: @kingstontech FURY Beast DDR5-Frequency: DDR5-10004MHzhttps://t.co/dbYSRWhEAQ#Z690 #DDR5 pic.twitter.com/xBxlYUesVrApril 26, 2022

There are always plenty of caveats when it comes to memory overclocking, and it's no different here. Apart from only using a single stick of RAM, and setting the latencies down to a ludicrously sluggish 76, the rest of the system had to be heavily gimped in order to hit the frankly ludicrous speed. That involved running the CPU at 425MHz and turning off all but one of the CPU's physical cores.

The CPU in question? That'd be the Intel Core i9 12900KS. Not exactly a cheap CPU. And certainly not one that you'd normally see hobbled quite so much. It's definitely not a chip you'd normally see operating on a 4x multiplier, albeit with a bus speed of 106.42MHz. For reference that 425MHz CPU normally has a base clock of 3.4GHz and a Max Turbo of 5.5GHz.

This isn't to detract from the memory overclock—that's a seriously impressive bit of tinkering—but it's worth highlighting that this isn't an overclock you'd want to run on a machine 24/7. I mean you could, but it'd be a fairly miserable experience.

The important thing here is that the promise of DDR5 hitting 10-12GT/s is still very much alive and well. That the Kingston memory can hit those frequencies is the important takeaway here. Well, that and the skill needed to actually achieve such a feat.

DDR5 hasn't had the easiest start in life, with prices being affected by the silicon shortage and also being hit by ongoing closures due to Covid. Still, the standard is sure to get a boost when AMD's Zen 4 launches later this year, which will apparently launch supporting only DDR5.

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.