So, Rocket Lake is good for something. The 11900K nails DDR4 overclocking record at 7156MHz

(Image credit: HyperX)

A new DDR4 overclocking record has been set by the MSI OC Team in Taiwan at a frankly staggering 7,156MHz. The record was set using a single stick of HyperX Predator 4600MHz 8GB DDR4. As the name suggests, the module is nominally rated at 4,600MHz, so represents a hefty overclock over the XMP profile.

If you're looking to set your own records, then the specific module you need to pick up is the HX44C19PB3K2/16, because the naming of RAM modules is a bit of a mess, and you're going to need to be specific to get this record-holding stick of memory.

It's worth noting that while this is a world record for RAM overclocking, it's not going to do much for you when it comes to gaming. Firstly because it's only a single stick of RAM, and is therefore only using one of your memory channels. The CAS Latency has also been hit hard to reach this frequency, with the stick running with a CAS Latency of 58. Gulp. For comparison, at 4600MHz the XMP profile has a CL of 19.

HyperX Predator DDR4 4600 overclocking record — (Image credit: Kovan Yang)

There's also the issue that this overclock was achieved using liquid nitrogen, which isn't that practical for day to day gaming. It's still an incredible overclock though.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that the MSI OC Team used an MSI motherboard to achieve this feat. Namely, the MSI MEG Z590I Unify—actually not an insanely expensive enthusiast-class motherboard for a change.

The fact the team turned to Intel's latest Core i9 11900K is more eyebrow-raising though, as the general consensus is Intel's top-end Rocket Lake chip isn't too exciting in itself. It would seem it has a few speedy aces up its 14nm++ sleeve though, especially when it comes to RAM speeds. In fact, the top four DDR4 RAM overclocks all use Rocket Lake chips, with the AMD Ryzen 7 4700GE the red team's first entry in 5th place, nearly 500MHz behind this new record.

Rocket Lake may be providing the goods here, but the overclocking team did have to massively downclock the Core i9 11900K to hit that world record memory clock. The CPU was running at just 1,490.85MHz, which is a 57.4% drop in the operating frequency.

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.