[nextpage title=”Introduction:”]
Today we’re going to take a look at the memory kit that everyone’s talking about, and which is currently one of the most coveted: the G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26. As its name suggests, this kit is primarily intended for AMD platforms, thanks to its ‘NEO’ reference, but it can also be used on an INTEL configuration. So why is this kit the talk of the town? Quite simply because it has excellent overclocking potential, while requiring less voltage than other kits for equivalent frequencies. We’ll also see that there are two types of PCB for this 6000 MT/s CL26 model. Note also that there are several 6000 MT/s NEO references, including the CL26, CL28, CL30, CL32 and CL36. The prices are different, as are the performance and overclocking capabilities.
We wanted to wait for our copy of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX to arrive before relaunching our comparative tests, but in the end we decided to give you a first glimpse of its overclocking performance on the ROG Crosshair X870E HERO.
Thanks to G.SKILL for making this copy of the Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 kit available.
[nextpage title=”Packaging description:”]
Our G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 kit is delivered in a cardboard box with the usual colour code in keeping with the spirit of the brand. The label of our two white sticks can be seen on the back of the box thanks to the two cut-outs. You can also see that they are enclosed and protected in a transparent plastic cover. On the rear of the box, there is also a label informing future purchasers of the characteristics of their memory kit. Two cut-outs on the labels provide confirmation of this information.
Once the box is opened, we find our two modules perfectly protected in a transparent plastic shell. This ‘Trident Z5 NEO’ series arrived with the arrival of the DDR5 memory kits and is mainly intended for AMD configurations, although you can use this kit on an INTEL platform.
The Trident Z5 NEO kit is available in either white or black. In the Trident Z5 NEO series, only kits with RGB backlighting are available. However, you can opt for the Trident Z5 Royal NEO series if you prefer this design. Our sample of the day is white, from the Trident Z5 NEO series and features RGB backlighting.
Features and cooling:
Our kit is clocked at 6000 MT/s, has timings of 26-36-36-96 and requires a voltage of 1.40 volts to operate. It consists of two 16 GB modules for a total of 32 GB.
The Heatspreaders are made of aluminium. They are responsible for dissipating the heat generated by the eight-layer PCB and the memory chips. If you’ve already had a G.SKILL Trident kit in your hands, you’ll quickly realise that G.SKILL has kept the same spirit in the design of the heatspreader.
The name of the series appears on both sides. A label lists some of the features of our kit. In terms of price, it is currently available in France at around 250 euros. On the top, you’ll find the RGB backlight with the inscription G.SKILL.
To conclude this presentation, the kit is AMD EXPO compatible. So don’t forget to activate the profile directly via your motherboard’s BIOS. Let’s now have a look at the characteristics of this G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 kit.
[nextpage title=”How to identify your memory kit:”]
Basic features :
You’re going to tell us that this is fairly easy, as all you have to do is look at the references advertised by the manufacturer. Yes, but that’s not enough, especially if you’re planning to overclock it! Some of the information is given by the manufacturer, but you’ll have to dig around – or even remove the heat sinks – to find out the others, or look for confirmation on the web.
One side of the heatsink reads “Trident Z5 NEO RGB” and the other has a label with the technical specifications of our example, which looks more like a code name: “F5-6000J2636G16GX2-TZ5NRW”. This is what we’re going to look at in detail. For example, in the case of today’s model, this is the information we know.
- The brand: G.SKILL
- Model: Trident Z5 NEO RGB
- Capacity: 2 x 16 GB
- Frequency: 6000 MT/s
- Timings: 26-36-36-96
- Voltage : 1.40 volts
- Revision: January 2025
In order to get an idea of the overclocking potential of your kit, this information is insufficient and you will need to go further. It’s also very important to know the revision of the PCB and the model of the chips in your memory kit. Depending on this information, the kit’s overclocking performance will be very different.
To find this information, there is only one solution: dismantle the heat sinks. The Taiphoon Burner software does not currently support DDR5 kits. And there is no indication that this will be the case in the future.
CPU-Z always present:
Fortunately, our trusty CPU-Z software is still with us, allowing us to verify this information, particularly with regard to the type of chips used in our kit. There are currently three types of chip: Samsung, Hynix and Micron.
Our kit is perfectly compatible with Windows 11 and the different timings are perfectly readable. The memory chips in our kit are Hynix. These are the chips with the best overclocking potential. As this is a 2 x 16 GB kit, we already know with near certainty that these are second-generation Hynix A-die chips.
Our memory kit PCB :
Our kit benefits from 2GB chips, 8 in total. We’re with Hynix A-die chips here, but this is a new generation that allows us to further improve the frequency rise. Our kit is an ‘SR’ model for single rank, meaning that all the chips are on one side only. In contrast, there are ‘DR’ ( dual rank ) kits with chips on both sides of the PCB.
Our PCB is a little unusual in that it has a CDK chip, which is not active, and is found on INTEL CDK models from G.SKILL. Did the brand want to save money by reusing ready-made PCBs and just deactivating the CDK chip? We can also see that the chips carry the ‘446V’ batch. From what we’ve been able to read, the ‘447V’ chips could reach full potential under LN2. We’ll be doing some cold tests with this kit in the near future, and we’ll see what our kit equipped with the 446Vs is worth. One thing’s for sure, these kits seem to cope better with low temperatures.
Now, you should know that the majority of kits currently available use another PCB, without a CDK chip. This would be slightly less powerful than the PCB used in our kit. It would also perform better on ASUS cards, as they are older and have therefore already been much more tested (BIOS devs). These differences should be less visible in the coming months.
[nextpage title=”The importance of the EXPO profile:”]
BIOS settings :
It can’t be said often enough, but your memory kit parameters are not automatically set once you’ve installed it. If this is the case for your processor, it is not so for your memory kit and you will have to go through the BIOS! This is what we had to do with our Crosshair X870E HERO to get the BIOS to load the EXPO profile.
You can then configure it manually, choosing the right frequency, timings and voltage for your kit. For ease of use, we recommend that you enable EXPO mode (AMD)Â in ‘ AI Overclock Tuner ‘ so that it can be set automatically.
Without this, your performance will be impacted in all areas and you will end up with a kit that does not exceed the CL40 frequency of 4800 MHz. Performance will then be extremely limited. So we’re going to activate our EXPO profile directly in the BIOS. The proposed EXPO I is the 6000 MT/s profile. The other two profiles, EXPO and EXPO Tweaked, are very slightly different in terms of subtimings and sometimes perform slightly better. We invite you to try them out.
The ROG BIOSes, whether on the APEX or the Crosshair models, benefit from memory profiles. They provide a good basis for overclocking your memory kit. We’ll start by using them in our overclocking tests if they prove interesting, and we’ll explain all that later in the article. Our kit is now set up in the BIOS and will work with the manufacturer’s specifications.
As you can see from the screenshots above, once the EXPO profile has been activated, the settings are automatically detected. The frequency is set to 6000 MT/s, the 26-36-36-96 timings are activated and the voltage is increased to 1.40 volts.
[nextpage title=”Stock vs overclocking tests:”]
Of course, this kit will only be tested on an AMD platform, initially, as this kit is intended for this configuration from the outset. We opted for the ROG Crosshair X870E HERO motherboard, which remains the most recent model on this chipset. As we said in the introduction, there will be no comparative tests, as we await the arrival of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX to update our graphics.
- Motherboard: ROG Crosshair X870E HERO (BIOS 9951)
- Processor: Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- Memory: 32 GB G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO 6000 MT/s CL26
- Graphics Card: MSI GT 710
- SSD: Western Digital SN850 NVMe SSD M.2
- Power supply: be quiet! Dark Power PRO 12 1500w
- Operating system: Windows 11 64 bits
Our OS is in no way optimised, since it’s the one we use as ‘standard’ for our processor tests.
Overclocking this 6000 MT/s CL26 kit:
For memory overclocking, there are 5 key voltages. These are the voltages that will have an impact on overclocking and therefore on the frequency rise or the tightening of timings. These are the SOC Voltage, the DRAM VVD Voltage, the DRAM VVDQ Voltage, the CPU VDDIO/MC Voltage and the Vddp Voltage. Here’s where you’ll find these voltages in the BIOS of our ROG Crosshair X870E HERO.
Please note that depending on the type of memory chip (Micron, Hynix and Samsung), the balance between these different voltages is different. If your PMIC module is not locked, activating ‘ High DRAM Voltage Mode ‘ will give you access to voltages of up to 2.00 volts. Now it’s time to overclock this G.SKILL DDR5.
By increasing the voltage on the VVD to 1.73 volts and the VVDQ to 1.68 volts, we were able to easily reach a frequency of 8600 MT/s in 32-47-44-48. Of course, we’ve also tightened up all the subtimings . We’re going to carry out an initial series of tests comparing stock performance, i.e. with the 6000 MT/s C26 kit and our overclocked version at 8600 C32. We were also able to push the FCLK frequency to 2167 MHz.
Aida 64 :
This is a piece of software capable of providing you with a great deal of information about your configuration, but above all it has a memory benchmark. This calculates the read, write and copy speeds as well as the latency of your memory kit. It is often used to compare memory kits. It’s an excellent tool if you want to compare the performance of your memory kit with those we’ve already tested. The version used for the tests is 7.60.7300 and we have used the performance of the kits previously tested.
We can see that overclocking is fully beneficial and that throughputs are skyrocketing. Reading speed has risen from 77045 to 102314 MB/s, writing from 80286 to 106030 MB/s and copying from 70935 to 96708 MB/s. Latency, meanwhile, has improved from 77.7 to 66.9 n/s.
Geekbench 3.4.4:
This benchmark is available in several revisions, with version 5 having just been released a few weeks ago. It provides two scores: one single and one multi. Using this benchmark, we’re going to focus on the performance obtained on the ‘ Memory Multi-Core ‘ score, which differentiates memory performance. The version used for testing is 3.4.4.
For the next results, it’s important to bear in mind that the performance gain is only due to memory overclocking. Imagine if you added processor overclocking. The single-core score rises from 9782 to 10506 points (+7.4%) and the multi-core score from 121987 to 125512 points (+2.9%). The memory score rises from 9845 to 13922 points (+41.4%).
Geekbench 5.5.1 :
We’ve decided to add this extra benchmark, but why? The CPU benchmark uses new tests that more faithfully simulate the tasks facing processors in the face of recent applications. Geekbench 5 also increases the memory used during the benchmark to better reflect the impact of this parameter on the CPU results. For the time being, we’ll be keeping both, as version 3 is still widely used. We have also migrated to the latest version, 5.5.1.
The same can be said of Geekbench 5, with the single-core score improving from 2578 to 2686 points (+4.2%) and the multi-core score from 25803 to 28775 points (+11.5%).
Geekbench 6 :
We recently received a key for version 6 of Geekbench. So we took advantage of the change in configuration to add this new benchmark to our test suite. This is the latest benchmark and is intended to be more representative of current configurations. Primate Labs also assures us that the scores displayed by Geekbench 6 are more accurate in relation to the various existing devices and platforms. The test is also much longer than the other two versions we use. Our tests will be carried out on the latest version, i.e. 6.2.2.
Last test and nothing changes, we can measure the gains obtained by our kit of the day clocked at 8600 MT/s in CL36. The single-core score rose from 3482 to 3570 points (+2.5%) and the multi-core score from 22620 to 25959 points (+14.7%).
[nextpage title=”The final word:”]
Our impressions of this Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 kit:
We’ve come to the end of this first series of tests and evaluation of the overclocking capabilities of this G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 memory kit. As we said at the start of this article, we’re waiting for our copy of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX motherboard to arrive so that we can update our comparative tests of memory kits. But we didn’t want to wait to show you the excellent potential of this G.SKILL kit. As we’ve seen, overclocking is ultra-high-performance, with CL32 speeds of 8600 MT/s easily achievable, even though we’re using a 4-dimm motherboard .
With a price tag of under 250 euros, the price is still high for a frequency of 6000 MT/s, but it’s important to understand that these are chips that have been sorted to cope with the CL26. We’ll be testing our 6000 MT/s CL28 and CL30 kits in the near future, so you can see the differences. This kit is mainly intended for those who are going to overclock it, since at the original frequencies and timings, you are unlikely to notice any differences.
While we await the comparative tests, we can already give it the ‘coup de coeur’ mention (Editor’s Choice) and thank G.SKILL for making this copy of the Trident Z5 NEO RGB 6000 MT/s CL26 kit available. We’ll be back in a few days to see if we can further improve overclocking on a 2-dimm card with our copy of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX. Feel free to share your comments below or by joining our Discord.
