G.Skill and Overclocker Bl4ckdot Shatter Another DDR5 World Record

The competitive world of extreme overclocking is a bit like professional sports for computer hardware, with records made to be broken -- often within weeks. The latest milestone comes from French overclocker "bl4ckdot," who just pushed a 24GB module of G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 memory to an astonishing 12,872 MT/s (which also resulted in a frequency of 6436.1MHz with memory timings at 68-127-127-127-2).

Now, before you run to your desktop to try and break some records, know that achieving these speeds isn't something you can do with a standard gaming PC. It requires some very specific, and very cold, special equipment. 

This overclock started with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor and an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard (a model popular among overclocking enthusiasts). But the real key here is a bath of liquid nitrogen to keep the components from melting under the extreme temps. 

If you don't know why anyone would go through all this effort to do this, it's because there's an entire community of enthusiasts dedicated to pushing hardware beyond its intended limits. Often, the goal is to just maintain the overclock long enough to validate a new score in a program like CPU-Z. 

G.Skill is often at the forefront of these record-breaking attempts, designing its memory modules with the headroom necessary for this kind of punishment. 

No, it's not representative of everyday performance, but it's an important reminder of  the inherent potential hiding inside consumer-level hardware, with DDR 5 memory being one of the favorite targets for overclockers right now.