G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-7200 CL34 Memory Review

When you want extremely fast DDR5 with low latency

Memory. Your system won’t work without it. Those words, while profound, are simply the truth. And in today’s review we will be looking at a memory kit that doesn’t just allow your system to POST, but one that is significantly faster than most of the DDR5 out there today.

Reviewing RAM is actually how I started my journey here at PCPer, with a review of some very fast DDR3 (2666 MT/s). I even reviewed some DDR5 last week, with a 6000 MT/s kit from Lexar. But 6000 MT/s is less that 7200 MT/s, and somehow G.Skill managed to hit that speed with a CAS latency of only 34.

What am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-7200, model F5-7200J3445G16GX2-TZ5RS, of course. Timings are an impressive 34-45-45-115 at the rated 7200 MT/s speed, though voltage will rise from the default 1.1V to 1.4V when setting the XMP profile.

But enough about the technical details – let’s take a close look at this kit, look at the timings and other technical details some more (I lied), and see how it performed.

Design and Performance 

Before getting into some more juicy technical details, let’s look at a stock photo showcasing the two available colors that G.Skill offers with this kit:

We received the metallic silver finish on our review sample, and while I still prefer the look of G.Skill’s Trident Z Neo heatspreader (just a personal preference), I think these look nice. Here’s what G.Skill has to say:

“Trident Z5 RGB series DDR5 memory is designed for ultra-high performance on DDR5 platforms. Featuring a sleek and streamlined aluminum heatspreader design, available in metallic silver or matte black, the Trident Z5 RGB series DDR5 DRAM memory is the ideal choice to build a high-performance system.”

There you have it. Sleek and streamlined. And aluminum. Let’s test them – and because I want to finish this review before AMD microcode maturity, I’ll use an Intel board. (Seriously, 7200 MT/s @1.40V on AM5 right now? I don’t even want to go there.)

Running Thaiphoon Burner didn’t result in the level of data (A-die, M-die, etc.) that I was hoping for, but maybe you can discern something from this readout that I missed. These contain Hynix ICs of course, are single rank, and have an XMP 3.0 profile to get you to that lovely 7200 MT/s at CL34.

Here’s what CPU-Z has to say about these DIMMs:

I had zero trouble with running this memory at full speed via XMP on an ASUS ROG Strix Z690 Gaming board, but you might want to double-check compatibility with the G.Skill QVL for this kit, or your motherboard’s QVL (you’ll have to find that link yourself, because I don’t know what board you have). Now let’s see what sort of scaling there might be compared to some slower kits, using a couple of benchmarks.

Just in case you don’t believe the table above, here’s PROOF of the test setup via HWiNFO64 summary:

Onto the first benchmark result, which is AIDA64’s memory test:

Is it rewarding to know that in a synthetic test, faster memory is faster? Maybe, but what about a real-world test? Personally, I like to use the command line 7-Zip benchmark tool, which outputs a nice text file with an average compressing and decompressing rate (in MIPS) after four runs:

Even in a real application like 7-Zip, we see a noticeable uplift in performance. Not huge, but we are just testing RAM and not changing the processor or anything else. I think there would also be a difference if looking at 1% lows in 1080/low gaming or some other CPU-bound gaming test, but I didn’t do that. YET. (My plans for this kit involve GPU testing, including 1% lows, as they will power the new and improved PCPer GPU testbed.)

Final Thoughts

G.SKILL’s Trident Z5 RGB memory is another solid addition to the company’s high-performance desktop memory offering, and it offers impressive speed and low latency for those that care about such things when building or upgrading a PC. Personally, I’m looking forward to running this RAM with the Intel Core i9-13900KS when testing graphics cards, just for that added peace of mind that the memory isn’t holding the platform back at all.

I can’t omit at least one mention of the lighting with this kit, which is of the ARGB variety

Value with this kit is pretty good, too. According to Amazon, the “typical price in last 90 days” was $269.99, but it’s down to just $199.99 right now (link), which is $70 lower in case you can’t do math in your head like that.

Is it worth spending $200 USD on 32GB of DDR5 when G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-6000 CL36 can be had for as little as $114.99 (link)? That is between you and your conscience. Can you really live with yourself if you don’t have 7200 MT/s in your system? (Oh, you can? Well, OK then. But this kit is nice. I enjoy it.)