At the conclusion of Intel’s Creator Challenge, renowned overclocker Allen “Splave” Golibersuch overclocked the Core i9-13900K CPU to 8.2 GHz while it was running under liquid nitrogen (LN2). On October 20, the flagship Raptor Lake chip, which will compete for a place on the list of top CPUs, will become available for purchase in stores for $589.
With eight P-cores and sixteen E-cores, the Core i9-13900K is a 24-core CPU. Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) technology from Intel allows the processor to operate at a maximum turbo boost frequency of 5.8 GHz. Splave dramatically increased the Core i9-13900speed K’s beyond Intel’s specification by 41%, bringing it to 8.2 GHz.
The Core i9-13900K exhibits tremendous overclocking capability; by comparison, the Core i9-12900K could only reach 7.6 GHz. As a result, the Core i9-13900K broke the previous record set by the Core i9-12900K by 8%.
The Zen 4 CPUs from AMD also offer advantages. For instance, we recently saw that the Ryzen 9 7950X was capable of reaching 7.2 GHz on a single core and 6.5 GHz on all of its cores. However, HWBot claims that the Ryzen 9 7950X’s top speed is 7.4 GHz (7,471.96 MHz). As a result, the Ryzen 9 7950X and Core i9-13900K have clock speeds that are around 11% apart.
It will be intriguing to watch to see whether Raptor Lake can keep dominating the overclocking rankings. Since quite some time, CPU speeds have surpassed the 8 GHz ceiling. The majority of the HWBot entries date back to the Bulldozer era and AMD’s outdated FX family of processors, which were infamous for attaining high clock rates. The FX-8370, which achieved this achievement in 2014, continues to retain the record for the fastest CPU, clocking in at 8.7 GHz (8,722.78 MHz).
Consumers are more concerned with performance right out of the box than overclocking, where Intel and AMD continue to outperform each other. So even though the Core i9-13900K seems excellent under LN2, we won’t know for sure until Raptor Lake debuts on October 20 whether it can defeat AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X.