Processors ‘took’ a new level of gigahertz – a record 9 GHz
The company Asus reports that its team of extreme overclockers has officially broken the world record for the frequency of the central processor. Its experts overclocked the Intel Core i9-13900K to more than 9 GHz. The achievement was recorded on an open stand with an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard.
The 9GHz barrier has been out of reach for decades, even for the best processors and most experienced extreme overclockers. The first processors to approach 9 GHz were AMD’s FX series processors. Numerous overclockers have reached over 8GHz over the years.
Even now, many FX series processors are inducted into the HWBot Hall of Fame. For example, the FX-8370 processor’s record 8.722 GHz result from the Stilt overclocker is now the second highest clock speed of all time.
The processor reached a maximum clock speed of 9.009 GHz and was stable enough to run the Pifast test for 6.85 seconds and the SuperPi 32M test for 3 minutes, 3 seconds and 778 milliseconds.
To get maximum overclocking, the Asus team disabled all energy-efficient cores (E-cores) of the Core i9-13900K and disabled hyper-threading (one physical core works as two virtual ones), limiting the processor to only 8 P-cores (productive cores) and 8 threads.
The team used an unusual combination of liquid nitrogen (LN2) and liquid helium for cooling. According to SkatterBencher, one of Asus’ overclockers, the Core i9-13900K chip is one of the most ‘pretty’ processors he’s seen under liquid helium. The chip scales very well in extremely cold environments and operates at a very stable temperature of -250 degrees Celsius, without much fluctuation.
The record result of the Core i9-13900K is explained by the fact that it is built on the Raptor Lake architecture. This is the architecture with the highest clock frequencies among Intel processors in all history. The chips on it can reach 5.8GHz out of the box. Enthusiasts are waiting for the release of the Core i9-13900KS, which will be able to stably hold 6 GHz without significant difficulties.
