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.
