G.SKILL and Kingston break through the 12,000MT/s DDR5 Memory Barrier with Intel's Arrow Lake CPU

Intel's Core Ultra 200S chips (also known as Arrow Lake) officially support DDR5-6400 memory. Memory specialists from G.SKILL, Kingston and other manufacturers have been overclocking some fancy new DDR5 DIMMs. The result? The speed is not far from twice as fast, as both memory vendors have smashed through the DDR5-12000 bar.

We'll get back to this in a minute. G.SKILL claims 12,066MT/s, while Kingston thinks it's done just a little bit better with 12,108MT/s.

These figures are partly possible due to the latest CU DIM memory technology. CU-DIMM sticks have a dedicated clock driver. The idea is to reduce CPU's involvement in memory clock synchronization, which will improve stability and allow higher memory frequencies.

There are a number of caveats that must be made. Kingston's results were not only attained by liquid nitrogen cooling of the DDR5 sticks. It also involved running the Core Ultra 7 CPU 265KF with its E cores turned off and the P cores at 400MHz.

The CPU clock will essentially negate any performance gains, even if they are only theoretical. Even then, running liquid nitrogen cooling will not give you much uptime.

Let's pretend for a moment that you can hit DDR5-12000 with full CPU clocks without exotic cooling. What difference would it make?

Nick has recently looked at the performance of Arrow Lake using different memory speeds. He found that the jump in speed from DDR5-6400 official to DDR-8200 resulted in an increase of 103fps at 1080p to 109fps. This is just over 5%.

Baldur's gate 3 has even better results. It shows a 10% increase in frame rates average at 1080p, going from DDR5-6400 up to DDR-8200. Homeworld 3 and Total War: Warhammer III, however, showed modest gains. They added just one FPS each.

It's subjective to what you think of these gains. On the other hand, it's hard to feel the benefits in real life. On the other hand, 10% is quite a significant jump when you compare it to the modest gains in gaming performance that AMD's Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake have made.

AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors are only marginally faster in gaming than their Ryzen 7000 predecessors. Intel's Core Ultra 200S CPUs, on the other hand, are actually a little slower than their 14th Gen Raptor Lake counterparts. Any additional performance gains that can be achieved by using fast memory will be welcomed.

It is not possible to assume that adding more memory frequency will lead to a proportionally higher frame rate. You would expect a little bit more performance. DDR-12000 will likely make Arrow Lake appear a bit less disappointing when it comes to gaming.

It's an academic discussion, as there is no way to play a game with a memory that runs at 12,000MT/s. It's a large number, and it keeps things moving forward. It's worth being realistic before you spend a lot of money on some fancy DDR5.