Asus ROG and its overclocking partner Bianbao XE set the record for the fastest effective frequency ever achieved with DDR4 memory modules at 6,666.6 MHz. They set this record using an Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming motherboard with a Ryzen 7 4700GE processor and Crucial Ballistix Max memory.

Technically, as verified by HWBot (via Tom's Hardware), this is the first time Asus and Bianbao have set a RAM stick at 6,666 MHz. However, they came close to calling it so a few months ago when they achieved 6,665.4 MHz on an Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake system with G.Skill RAM.

This time, Asus and Bianbao went even further, resulting in the top two spots on HWBot's memory frequency leaderboard. No mention was made of memory timings, but we can guess that they were running loose (and apparently fast... . very fast), we can assume that it was running.

This type of overclocking is almost academic. The fastest DDR4 memory you can buy is DDR4-5000 with Corsair's LPX RAM (G.Skill also achieved DDR4-5000 with air cooling, but does not yet offer a consumer kit at this frequency). As for Crucial, the fastest I have found memory are the two Ballistix Max DDR4-4400 kits.

DDR4 memory kits will not get any higher in the consumer realm; at 6,666.6 MHz, Bianbo had to use liquid nitrogen for cooling. Still, it will be interesting to see how far professional overclockers can push these chips, especially when trying to set benchmark records on AMD systems (in general, Ryzen CPUs benefit from higher frequency RAM than Intel CPUs).

Now the question is whether we can achieve 7,000 MHz with DDR4 and enter DDR5 territory. We will have to wait and see for a while.