Asus announced that the company’s Extreme Overclocker team has successfully overclocked an Intel Core i9-13900K to over 9GHz, officially breaking the world record for CPU frequency.
The company announced the achievement on Twitter, recorded on an open bench system powered by an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard.
The CPU ran Pifast for 6.85 seconds and SuperPi 32M for 3 minutes, 3 seconds, and 778 milliseconds while operating at a maximum clock speed of 9008.82 MHz. This accomplishment has been mentioned on HWBOT and has become a new world record according to competition rules.
Asus’ team disabled all E-cores in the Core i9-13900K and even disabled the hyper-threading feature, limiting the CPU to 8 P-cores and eight threads. It used an unusual combination of liquid nitrogen (LN2) and liquid helium for cooling. The chip scales well in cryogenic environments, running at a stable temperature of -250°C without much fluctuation.
There have been many attempts to break the 9 GHz barrier, but it’s something even the best CPUs and experienced overclockers have failed to achieve over the years. The first CPUs to come close to 9 GHz were AMD’s FX series processors, which over the years, have seen multiple overclockers hit above 8 GHz, but have never been able to exceed 9 GHz.
The previous official record was 8.722 GHz for the FX-8370. And Intel CPUs have been trailing AMD in the last few years when it comes to overclocking, but they’ve finally reclaimed the throne with this record.
The improvements Intel has made to the Raptor Lake process node are undoubtedly the reason for the new world record. Raptor Lake is Intel’s highest-clock CPU architecture in history, and the Core i9-13900K can reach a boost clock of 5.8 GHz.
