If you thought DDR5 had reached its limit, well, think twice because a Canadian overclocker going by the tasty name saltycroissant has achieved 13,020MT/s on an Intel system, crossing the hallowed 13GT/s mark for the first time. This didn’t come easily however, since latency had to be pushed way too high to maintain stability.
This new record came shortly after salty’s previous 12,920.20MT/s achievement, which was made possible with some help from fellow overclockers Hicookie, sofos, and Splave. Thus, saltycroissant is probably still using the same test bench, comprised of a Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Tachyon Ice motherboard, a single 24GB module of Corsair DDR5, and an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU. The latter two were cooled using Liquid Nitrogen to maintain low temperatures. Furthermore, the salty one also downgraded the CPU configuration from its original 5.5GHz boost frequency to 2,061MHz, while disabling the E-cores, in an effort to improve stability.
To achieve this outstanding 13,020MT/s (6,510MHz) speed, something had to give. Unsurprisingly, it was, once more, latency that was sent to the moon, with CL 68-128-128-256 reported by CPU-Z. Needless to say that at this point, any memory-sensitive app or game will perform poorly. For comparison, current DDR5-6400 kits hover around CL 32-39-39, while slower 6,000MT/s kits go further down to CL28-36-36-96.
To be fair, there isn’t a way around higher latency when you push frequency up – it’s not magic. When you go beyond 10,000MT/s, even dual-channel memory starts becoming a stability concern, hence saltycroissant’s use of a single 24GB module. Due to this, DDR5 overclocking is starting to run out of steam, with new records barely topping their predecessors by a dozen MT/s. Still, we wonder how far things will go until the launch of DDR6, expected for 2027.
Overall, a great result that makes us dream of the day we can have such speed on air-cooled machines. iGPUs would surely love having access to so much bandwidth. With that said, saltycroissant has yet to validate this achievement on the HWBOT platform to make it official, which shouldn’t take long. Until then, congratulations on this impressive overclock.
