Overclocker Takes Intel’s Core i9-12900KS to 7.45GHZ on LN2

Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900KS CPU came out recently to do battle with AMD’s V-Cache enabled Ryzen 5800X3D. While those two chips will go head-to-head in real world gaming benchmarks soon, overclockers are already having a field day with Intel’s latest silicon. The headline feature of this CPU is that it’s a binned 12900K CPU, so it’s been pre-selected as offering the most headroom from Intel’s silicon stockpile. Right off the shelf it offers a two-core boost clock of 5.5GHz and an all-core clock of 5.2GHz. This is slightly higher than the vanilla 12900K’s maximum boost clock of 5.2GHz. Binned chips like this are tantalizing for extreme overclockers, and one of them has already taken Intel’s newest CPU to an insane clock speed of 7,450.62MHz using liquid nitrogen (LN2). For the uninitiated, LN2 is around 320 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, so it can keep a CPU pretty cold.

MSI Team overclocker TSAIK was able to take Intel’s chip up to 7.45GHz, but to do it he had to use just a single P-core. According to Tom’s Hardware, this is a 35 percent boost over typical 1C/2T overclocks. His CPU was strapped to an MSI MEG Unify-X motherboard, which is a Z690 board designed for extreme overclocking. As evidence of this has only two DIMM slots and 19+2 power phases. It’s unclear what model of memory sticks were used, as the HWBot leader board only lists “Samsung.” Although TSAIK took the top spot for highest overclock, one look at the HWBot standings shows another overclocker holds the most benchmark records.

As you can see an overclocker named Splave has almost claimed a clean sweep of all the records. If it wasn’t for Semann in SuperPi, he would hold every record aside from the max overclock number. Interestingly, he has already overclocked a standard 12900K to 7.6GHz, but this leader board only applies to Intel’s newest chip. Splave used an ASRock Z690 Aqua OC motherboard to achieve this feat, which granted him three world records, and three global first place finishes.

What this kind of overclocking accomplishes, aside from bragging right, is some crazy benchmark numbers. In Cinebench R20 test, the vanilla 12900K scores around 10K according to Anandtech, with the overclocked version hitting over 15K. In Geekbench 5’s multi-core test, the stock 12900K racks up 18.5K points, with the super-chilled 12900Ks hitting 27.8K. Those are impressive gains, despite them not being achievable with traditional cooling. What’s also encouraging is Intel’s new chip has only been out for a week. Results might improve in the future as Intel’s process node matures.

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