In the realm of G.Skill memory, the Trident Z Royal series has always been its flagship product. If we liken memory to cars, then the Trident Z Royal is akin to "Ferrari" and "Lamborghini." With its high-quality electroplated mirror-like metal heat spreaders, finely crafted transparent diamond light-guiding design, and stunning "Royal Diamond" lighting effects, its appearance is unparalleled among memory modules. Therefore, since its introduction in the DDR4 era, the Trident Z Royal memory has been highly sought after by DIY enthusiasts. Today, with the widespread adoption of DDR5 memory, the DDR5 version of the Trident Z Royal memory is now available. The question is, can it still deliver the ultimate experience it once offered?

Specifications for the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 Memory 48GB Kit:

Memory Capacity: 24GB x 2

Memory Voltage:

DDR5 5600 at 1.1V

DDR5 7200 at 1.35V

Default Timings: 36-46-46-115 at DDR5 7200

46-45-45-90 at DDR5 5600

Warranty: Lifetime WarrantyReference Price: 2099 Yuan

The "Diamond" in Memory

Deciphering G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 Memory

The Trident Z Royal series memory represents the most dazzling "gem" in G.Skill's Trident flagship family. Its patent crystal-clear material creates a transparent diamond light-guiding design that perfectly presents the ultimate and harmonious full light refraction, showcasing the unique "Royal Diamond" lighting effect. Even without being plugged into a computer, this memory is more exquisite in appearance compared to other memories. We know that general luminous memories often install a pure white light-guiding strip made of plastic material at the top of the memory to make the light effect more uniform and beautiful. For memory, these light-guiding strips have no "beautifying" effect when not glowing. However, the Trident Z Royal memory adopts a completely different design, which can be said that the manufacturer, when creating this memory, was not considering from the perspective of memory itself, but more like designing an artwork for jewelry brands such as Swarovski and Tiffany.

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On it, you will no longer see those monotonous white light-guiding strips. At the top, there is only a "beautiful scenery" composed of Swarovski crystal diamonds — its light-guiding strip has dozens of cutting faces inside, clear material, extremely high refraction rate, combined with aluminum alloy heat sinks that have been processed through multiple electroplating processes and have a clear and transparent mirror effect, offering two optional colors of "Royal Gold" and "Armor Silver". The entire memory looks extremely aesthetically pleasing and valuable. Considering that metal heat sinks with a mirror effect are generally very prone to dust and fingerprints, the memory packaging box also includes a special wiping cloth.

What's more worth mentioning is that G.Skill has completely opened the control rights of this "artwork" to users. Through ASUS AURA SYNC, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, ASRock Polychrome Sync, or G.Skill's self-developed Trident Z control console lighting software, users can set the lighting modes of the 8 RGB LEDs on the Trident Z Royal memory by themselves, and even set the color of each LED at will, the brightness and speed of the lighting effect, and enable up to 14 lighting effects including "Static", "Breathing", "Rainbow", "Breathing Rainbow", allowing users to create an extremely aesthetically pleasing gaming host.In terms of performance, the Royal Javelin DDR5 memory offers speeds of DDR5 6400, DDR5 7200, DDR5 7600, DDR5 8000, with the highest option being DDR5 8400. In this instance, we will be testing the DDR5 7200 product, which is not positioned at the high end. Although the default speed is not particularly impressive, the crucial memory chips used in the G.Skill Trident Z Royal (Royal Javelin) DDR5 7200 memory also employ the common core of current high-speed memory: SK Hynix's 14nm DDR5 memory chips— the new generation M-Die. These chips also have good overclocking potential, surpassing the A-Die chips that were once favored by DIY enthusiasts, and they require lower voltage at the same speed compared to A-Die chips.

For example, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal Royal Javelin memory has a nominal voltage of only 1.35V at DDR5 7200, with a latency of 36 (CL) - 46 (TRCD) - 46 (TRP) - 115 (TRAS). In contrast, the DDR5 7200 memory using A-Die chips that we tested last year required a voltage of 1.45V, and its CL latency was even higher, reaching 38. Additionally, the use of M-Die chips has increased the memory's storage density per unit. Although each memory module still uses a single-sided 8-chip design, each chip has a capacity of 3GB, and the capacity of a single memory module reaches 24GB. Therefore, the total capacity of the memory reaches 48GB, allowing the product to balance capacity and performance.

Operating the G.Skill Trident Z Royal Royal Javelin DDR5 7200 memory at DDR5 7200 is also quite simple. Users only need to enable the memory's XMP feature in the motherboard's BIOS, load the memory's DDR5 7200 XMP profile, save and restart, and no other settings are required to overclock the memory to DDR5 7200 with a single click. Most Z790 and B760 motherboards currently support DDR5 7200, a medium-high speed memory, and its moderate speed settings also allow it to be used on most motherboards.

Test Platform:

Motherboard: ROG MAXIMUS Z790 APEX ENCORE

Processor: Core i9-14900KS

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Royal Royal Javelin DDR5 7200 48GB memory kit

Storage: Crucial P5 PLUS 1TB

Graphics Card: GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPower Supply: AORUS AP1200PM Platinum Edition

Operating System: Windows 11

Stable operation at DDR5 8200

Considering that the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 48GB memory kit uses SK Hynix M-Die chips with great overclocking potential, our primary concern after acquiring this memory was its overclocking capability. To this end, we specifically used an overclocking expert — the Intel Core i9-14900KS processor and the ROG MAXIMUS Z790 APEX ENCORE motherboard to test its overclocking performance.

After several attempts, we found that the memory indeed possesses good overclocking capabilities. By increasing the memory VDDQ and VDD voltages to a working voltage of 1.53V and relaxing the latency to 38 (CL) - 50 (tRCD) - 50 (tRP) - 128 (tRAS) @ 2T, we were able to overclock this memory to DDR5 8200 and pass a 40-minute AIDA64 memory stability test.

We also discovered that, with the aid of high-quality aluminum alloy heat spreaders, coupled with the memory cooling fans of the ROG MAXIMUS Z790 APEX ENCORE motherboard, even after overclocking the memory working voltage from 1.35V to 1.53V, the heat generation is not high. Software detection recorded the highest operating temperature during the 40-minute stress test at DDR5 8200 to be around 58.5°C. Observing with a FLIR thermal imaging camera, the surface temperature of the memory heat spreaders was quite low, with only a warm touch, and most of the measured points were not higher than 45°C. Only the PCB temperatures on both sides of the memory were slightly higher, with the highest temperature around 58°C.

So, what kind of performance can the memory deliver at DDR5 8200 and DDR5 7200? To find out, we specifically compared it with a pair of DDR5 6000 memory 32GB kits with latency settings of 36-38-38-80.

Memory performance is significantly better than that of standard DDR5 6000 memory.Firstly, looking at memory performance, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory benefits from a higher speed rate, showing excellent performance at its nominal speed rate. Its AIDA64 memory read and write bandwidths can reach up to 113.64GB/s and 109.75GB/s, respectively, while the read bandwidth of DDR5 6000 memory is still less than 95GB/s. In the SiSoftware Sandra memory bandwidth test, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory's bandwidth is as high as 96GB/s, while the bandwidth of DDR5 6000 memory is only 75GB/s, with the former leading by 28%.

The higher memory speed also results in lower access latency, as memory access latency is determined by several factors including the operating speed, memory controller frequency, memory latency settings, or related bus frequencies. Therefore, with a significantly higher memory operating speed, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory's AIDA64 memory access latency is only 60.2ns, while the AIDA64 memory access latency for DDR5 6000 memory is 67.1ns. In the SiSoftware Sandra memory access latency test, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory's latency is 69.1ns, while the access latency for DDR5 6000 memory is as high as 78.4ns.

Similar results are observed in the PerformanceTest 11.0 memory performance test, where the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory achieved an overall memory performance score of 4863, leading by 15.8% compared to the 4199 score of the DDR5 6000 32GB memory kit. In the "Master Lu" memory performance test, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory kit scored 428930, a 27.3% increase over the DDR5 6000 memory. In the "Hardware Dog" memory performance test, the DDR5 6000 memory scored only 158264, while the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory achieved a score of 199820, leading by 26.3%.

When overclocked to DDR5 8200, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory can deliver even better performance, with AIDA64 memory read bandwidth breaking through 123GB/s and memory access latency under 60ns. The "Master Lu" memory performance test score breaks through 470,000, and the PerformanceTest 11 memory performance reaches 5126 points, easily defeating 99% of other memory products worldwide. It is worth noting that better memory performance also leads to better processor performance. When paired with DDR5 6000 memory, the Core i9-14900KS's "Master Lu" processor performance is 1,422,707 points, which increases by nearly 30,000 points to 1,452,486 after switching to the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory. After overclocking the memory to DDR5 8200, the processor can still slightly improve to 1,454,387 points. The reason is that the better the memory performance, the more data the memory transmits to the processor for processing each time, i.e., the greater the memory bandwidth, and the faster the data transfer speed, i.e., the lower the memory access latency, the more efficiently the processor will work, leading to better processor performance.

The maximum overclocking capability is DDR5 8600.If stability is not the primary concern, then by simply maintaining the memory VDD and VDDQ voltages at 1.53V and keeping the memory latency set to 38-50-50-128, we can still overclock the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory to a maximum of DDR5 8600. At this speed, the AIDA64 read and write bandwidth of the memory can exceed 130GB/s and 129GB/s, respectively, while the memory latency is further reduced to 53.9ns.

In the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark, the memory transfer bandwidth at DDR5 8600, which is 112.39GB/s, saw a slight improvement over the 106GB/s at DDR5 8200. The memory latency also decreased slightly from 66.3ns at DDR5 8200 to 64.5ns.

Additionally, in the "Master Lu" memory performance test, the score after overclocking to DDR5 8600 broke through the 500,000-point milestone; in the PerformanceTest 11 memory performance test, the score reached 5230 points; and in the "Hardware Dog" memory performance test, the score increased from 228,412 points at DDR5 8200 to 247,521 points. These scores are all very high compared to the memory scores tested in the "Microcomputer" evaluation lab, ranking at the top level.

Aesthetics, performance, and cost-effectiveness are all present.

From the above tests, it is evident that the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory not only boasts a diamond-like array of light guides and stunning lighting effects but also excels in performance. Although its nominal speed is not high, at only DDR5 7200, the tests show that it can be stably overclocked to DDR5 8200 for free, increasing the speed by 13.9%, and can even be overclocked up to DDR5 8600. After all, the memory chips used are the same as those in top-tier memory with nominal speeds around DDR5 8000, all being high-quality SK Hynix M-Die chips. In essence, there is no difference between some lower-spec memory and top-tier memory; they use almost the same chips, materials, and craftsmanship, with the only difference being the nominal specifications. If users have overclocking skills, they have the opportunity to "transform" this kind of memory into top-tier memory, and the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 is a representative of such memory.

Currently, the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 48GB kit is priced at 2099 yuan, which is a full 900 yuan cheaper than the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 8000 48GB with a nominal speed of DDR5 8000. Therefore, if you are a DIY enthusiast who values product appearance, RGB lighting effects, and has knowledge of overclocking techniques, then the G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR5 7200 memory is the choice that combines aesthetics, performance, and cost-effectiveness.