Introduction

When you want to maximize your Skylake system's performance for benchmarking without breaking the bank, G.Skill is the brand you should turn to. The company that offers affordable sticks with high clocks and huge capacity: G.Skill. The brand that has great looks and affordable prices: G.Skill. No matter what you are after when it comes to system memory, if you do not want to donate a kidney, G.Skill has always been there, ready to take your money in exchange for some killer sticks with killer looks that don't kill your wallet. Want an easy RMA? Call G.Skill.

I've used countless G.Skill kits over the years, so it should come as no surprise that G.Skill is my personal favorite. Sure, other brands are out there, and they have decent sticks and prices too, but nobody has kept me as satisfied as G.Skill has over the past decade and a bit that I've been pushing my systems' performance to the maximum. I've already reviewed many great DDR4 options for system memory, but I've yet to show you what you can get at the high end of performance. Skylake has huge amounts of bandwidth and supports huge capacities, but what about sticking with 8 GB sticks and scaling their speeds up to the limit? G.Skill sent me their TridentZ 3866 MHz DIMMs to investigate exactly that.

I've already shown you the new looks and such of the G.Skill TridentZ and Ripjaws V. Today, we take a look at how performance scales as you drop the capacity, but crank up speed. This high-clocked kit doesn't work in every motherboard, which you need to keep in mind. You need a specialized motherboard to reach the top frequencies of DDR4 right now. Fortunately, I have several. Let's push the limit.

Specifications