Intel Core i9-11900K With DDR4 Memory Dethrones Core i9-14900KS With DDR5 Memory In PYPrime Latency Benchmark World Record

The Intel Core i9-11900K, a three-year-old CPU, running on DDR4 memory has set a new world record, dethroning the 14900KS with DDR5.

The Intel Rocket Lake CPUs have been regarded as a "Waste of Sand" bringing in small uplifts in performance while regressing in the core count compared to the generation that was released prior. However, it looks like overclockers have found a new purpose for these chips & when tuned right, they can surpass even the best chips available on the market today.

The new world record memory overclocking feat comes from legendary overclocker, SPLAVE aka Allen Matthew, who decided to give the Intel Core i9-11900K (Rocket Lake) CPU a run on the Z590 OC Formula motherboard from ASRock. This motherboard features support for DDR4 memory & comes tuned for memory overclock with its dual DIMM design. The benchmark used was PYPrime which calculates the latency performance and the 32B run was used.

The previous record was achieved by renowned overclocker, SAFEDISK, who used an Intel Core i9-14900KS CPU running at 8.37 GHz (across 8 P-Cores) and a pair of G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB memory kits running at DDR5-9306 (CL32-47-42-34-2T). The previous world record was achieved in 1 minute, 37 seconds, and 596ms.

But SPLAVE decided he could do better while using older hardware. For the OC session, the Intel Core i9-11900K CPU was tuned to 6.957 GHz, and the pair of G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 memory was overclocked to DDR4-3914 (CL12-11-11-18-1T) speeds. With these speeds, the overclocker finished the benchmark in 1 minute, 37 seconds, and 311ms. This was just 285ms faster but when we ran the numbers on the overall latency figures, the Core i9-11900K achieved around 10% lower latency which is essential for this benchmark.

We have seen with the DDR5 memory generation that while overall bandwidth and speeds have seen a tremendous amount of improvement, the clock timings & latency have seen a downgrade. While this is expected to get on par with future DDR5 kits, currently platforms also run into the issue of using Gear 1 and Gear 2 modes with the Gear 2 mode hampering the capabilities by running the clocks at half the speed of the IMC.

This is also seen in AMD's Ryzen CPUs which run in a 1:2 memory clock ratio to support higher clock speeds so by default, the Gear 1 speeds capable with DDR4 and Rocket Lake CPUs are one step ahead of their Gear 2 counterparts. But this is just one benchmark and it doesn't mean that Rocket Lake is a better platform than Alder Lake or Raptor Lake CPUs.

In fact, it's far from the real deal as we have seen that the newer chips have introduced much higher core counts, clocks & IPC gains, leading to an overall better experience on them across a range of applications and games despite the memory latency being somewhat inferior to DDR4.