We love a beautifully unhinged cooling mod, and Australian overclocker and YouTuber Trashbench is arguably the champion of the genre. We've previously covered his exploits, like leveraging a camping chiller to aggressively overclock an RTX 5050, but in this latest video, Trashbench decided to take an Arctic WS360 360mm server AIO cooler and strap it directly to a GeForce RTX 3080. The result? A massive, aesthetically pleasing mod that halves the card's VRAM temperatures and offers impressive efficiency gains.

See, the Arctic WS360 is built for massive workstation CPUs. That means its copper cold plate is more than twice the size of a standard consumer liquid cooler. Surprisingly, this massive footprint makes it almost ideal for a modern GPU, as the cold plate is large enough to completely cover both the GPU core and the surrounding GDDR6X memory modules, slotting almost perfectly between the rows of VRM components. Once installed, it looks remarkably stylish, almost as if it were engineered specifically for the 3080.

Actually getting it to fit, however, was another story. Because the WS360's cold plate is so large, it completely obscures the standard GPU mounting holes. Trashbench shows off the project with his signature brand of Aussie nonchalance, but beneath the laid-back presentation, it's clear this took serious effort, requiring a dozen or more trial-and-error iterations to design and 3D-print a custom, functional mounting system.

Once the server cooler was successfully seated, the thermal results in 3DMark Time Spy were excellent, if not exactly shocking for a cooler of this pedigree. You can see the screenshot below, but for the sake of those with screen readers, his GPU core temperature dropped by 26°C, his GPU core hotspot temperature dropped by 39°C, and the VRAM temperature plummeted by 54°C, dropping from a scorching 104°C down to a frosty 50°C.

Because modern GPUs are highly sensitive to thermal limits, this massive drop in temperatures yielded immediate performance dividends. Without even applying a manual overclock, the liquid-cooled RTX 3080 matched the performance of the air-cooled card pushed to its absolute maximum OC. Even better is that the water-cooled card consumed less power at stock settings than the air-cooled version, while simultaneously delivering superior performance.

When Trashbench applied a manual overclock to the liquid-chilled card, he was able to squeeze out an additional +195 MHz on the core clocks. That translates to an average gaming performance uplift of around 9% over the stock air-cooled baseline. Not world-shattering perhaps, but NVIDIA doesn't give GPU tuners a lot of headroom for overclocking these days, so this is about as good as it gets without BIOS or shunt mods.

Now, as always with extreme mods, we don't recommend trying to replicate this at home. The Arctic WS360 is an expensive piece of server hardware; Trashbench noted his was supplied by Arctic. Dialing in the 3D-printed mounting brackets took a massive amount of patience, too. Still, it serves as a brilliant demonstration of just how much performance and efficiency headroom modern GPUs are hiding behind their thermal limits.

In my Ryzen 7 9850X3D review, I called AMD’s latest gaming chip “a 9800X3D in a trench coat.” It was a quip at AMD that, although technically the fastest gaming processor around, the new CPU was only 3.3% faster than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, despite selling for anywhere from $40 to $70 more. It’s a small margin that isn’t worth the extra money, but it’s still a consistent one. Say what you will about the 9850X3D, but it is technically faster than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in games where you aren’t completely bound by the GPU.

But PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) changes that dynamic. For our CPU reviews, we manually disable PBO to keep testing consistent. AMD’s PBO is dynamic and allows the processor to eke out a bit of extra performance when thermal and/or power conditions allow. It’s an uncontrolled variable in our reviews, voids your warranty, and is dependent on silicon and your specific setup, so we leave it off. However, it’s very easy to turn on. And the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with PBO turned on looks an awful lot like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.

I never expected wonders out of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. It’s identical to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, short of a 400MHz boost in maximum clock speed. It’s possible to hit those kinds of speeds on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, though not without a lot of manual tuning and some luck from the silicon lottery. Unless you’re an overclocking enthusiast with patience and a bit of luck, you shouldn’t expect 5.6GHz out of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D can hit those speeds out of the box.

Although you shouldn’t expect 5.6GHz from the Ryzen 7 9800X3D easily, you can still overclock it with PBO. Turn on PBO, let your motherboard determine the power limits (or turn them off), and add a 200MHz positive manual boost clock override. That’s something just about any Ryzen 7 9800X3D can do, assuming you have a decent CPU cooler. With just an extra 200MHz, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D looks nearly identical to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in games.

We retested the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D with PBO turned on and a positive 200MHz boost clock override for both CPUs, to see how that impacted gaming performance, efficiency, and clock speeds. In short, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can make up the thin margin between it and the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. AMD’s latest chip, however, has little to gain from even more clock speed, at least in games.

Before getting into the results, it’s worth reminding everyone that using PBO will void your warranty. We’re technically overclocking here, and that’s not covered by AMD’s warranty. If you’re concerned about that, just buy the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Look at the extra $40 to $70 as the cost of an extended warranty.

Overclocking the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and 9800X3D with PBO

You can do a lot with PBO, and even more if you combine it with tweaking additional settings in your BIOS. I kept everything simple here, mainly because you don’t need to do much to get the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to perform like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in games. In the BIOS, I turned on PBO to the “Advanced” mode — “Auto” is the default on most motherboards — and set a positive 200MHz boost clock override; the maximum allowed in PBO2. This isn’t a static 200MHz overclock. Rather, it extends the upper bound of PBO to allow up to 200MHz extra if thermal and/or power conditions allow.

I let my motherboard, in this case an MSI MPG X870E Carbon Wi-Fi, determine the power limits. That’s it. I didn’t do any manual tuning, undervolt with Curve Optimizer, or manually tune the memory beyond the 6000 MT/s EXPO profile pre-loaded on the kit.

From there, I ran Prime95 for 30 minutes to confirm the machine was stable and ran a 10-minute pass in Cinebench 2026 to check peak clocks on a single core and a single thread. That ended up being important because, as you’ll see in my tests, games don’t demand peak clock speeds from these chips — certainly not up to the 5.85GHz allowed to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D with PBO enabled.

Again, you can go a lot further than I did here. The scalar, for instance, will allow you to increase the length of the boost, though at a cost to CPU longevity. The whole point is seeing what you can quickly and easily achieve on any Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This isn’t a one-click overclock. It’s a two-click one.

I’ll list the full list of components for the test bench at the end of this piece, so skip ahead if you want to see what the bench looks like. The important note is that I tested with an RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition to remove any potential GPU bottlenecks.

With an extra 200MHz, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D gained 2.7% on average over its stock performance, leaving only 0.6% on the table compared to the stock Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D gained a mere 0.9% with an extra 200MHz from PBO. Outside of average performance, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D gained quite a bit on the 1% lows — 5.1%, specifically, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D saw a more modest 2.7% improvement in 1% lows.

Some of the other geomeans are interesting, as well, most notably clock speed. In games, at least, you see the extra 200MHz from PBO with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but you don’t see it with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Actually, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D with PBO had a slightly lower average clock speed (though only by an inconsequential 18MHz).

Power tells a similar story, with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D picking up an extra 20W with PBO on (24% higher than stock), but the Ryzen 7 9850X3D tops out right at 106W across both the stock and PBO passes. Despite the Ryzen 7 9850X3D coming out with marginally more power draw, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with PBO enabled actually ended up the hottest during our game testing, jumping nearly 16% compared to stock behavior.

That suggests what we all expected, which is that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is a binned 9800X3D. We’re dealing in very tight margins here, however.

A Plague Tale: Requiem Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

A Plague Tale: Requiem is an interesting game to look at. Although it clearly scales with clock speed, the game seems to benefit far more from the unshackled power available through PBO. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D gains 4.4% with PBO compared to stock performance, outpacing the stock Ryzen 7 9850X3D. AMD’s latest chip, however, gained an impressive 7.3%, and with much better 1% lows in tow.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Baldur’s Gate 3 sees virtually no scaling outside of the stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The results for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D (both stock and PBO) and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with PBO are slightly different, but they’re functionally identical, evidenced by the consistent 1% lows. Looking at clock speed, you can see the game tops out around 5.45GHz, with the stock Ryzen 7 9850X3D actually achieving the highest clock speed at 5.5GHz. This likely has to do with all-core clocks with PBO, suggesting there might be some minor performance gains in this game if you tune the Ryzen 7 9850X3D with Curve Optimizer on a per-core basis.

Counter-Strike 2 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Counter-Strike 2 is somewhat of a platonic ideal for this test. Scaling falls exactly how you’d expect it to, with both the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D gaining around 1.5% in average frame rate with an extra 200MHz via PBO. The real winner here for both chips is consistency. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D gained 16.6% in 1% lows with PBO, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D gained nearly 21%.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Cyberpunk 2077 is heavy on your GPU, so it’s no surprise that the stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D put up almost identical performance. Looking at clock speed, you can see average clocks refuse to budge beyond about 5.4GHz, explaining the stonewall these chips are running into. Regardless, every situation outside of the stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D demands far more power and cooling potential, and for very little performance gain.

Doom: The Dark Ages Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Doom: The Dark Ages is heavy on the GPU, as well, and even moreso than Cyberpunk 2077 due to its always-on ray tracing. The idTech 8 engine shows good CPU scaling between different chips, but the margins are very tight here. You’re drawing more power and generating more heat, but the stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D is where you want to be for the best efficiency and largely similar performance.

F1 2024 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Like Counter-Strike 2, the results here fall where you’d expect them, though with less consistent steps in between. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D saw a decent 3.2% improvement with PBO, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D only saw a 0.5% improvement. The consistent jump was in 1% lows, with both chips improving by nearly 5%.

Far Cry 6 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Far Cry 6 is more inconsistent than some games in our test suite, requiring five passes for each chip to get usable results. Here, you can see the median result for the stock Ryzen 7 9850X3D was actually a touch higher than the PBO version; that’s just what you get with this title sometimes. With less than 1% between them, we’re looking at functionally identical performance, especially approaching 300 fps. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D held up better, jumping 3.7% with PBO and overcoming the inconsistency inherent in this game.

Final Fantasy XIV Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Final Fantasy XIV is one of the titles where the stock Ryzen 7 9850X3D showed big performance gains over the stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D, so it’s no surprise that PBO helps here. What is surprising is how the performance tapers off. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D saw a solid 5.8% jump with PBO, and a 7.2% increase in 1% lows. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, meanwhile, only saw a 2% improvement with 1% lows in lockstep.

Flight Simulator 2024 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Flight Simulator 2024 is a more aggressive example of what Final Fantasy XIV shows. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D jumped by 5% with PBO turned on, but past that point, the scaling completely disappears. The performance is functionally identical between the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with PBO and both versions of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Spider-Man 2 is a game that’s notoriously heavy on CPUs, but the scaling with clock speed is minor. Even the Ryzen 7 9800X3D jumped just 1.7%, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D saw virtually no change in performance. The big change came in power consumption, as is the case with every game I tested. Here, however, you’re just not getting much extra performance for the higher power draw.

Hitman 3 Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

The rest of the benchmarks here tell mostly the same story. We include them to keep our test suite rounded, but we’ll let the data speak for itself.

Hogwarts Legacy Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Minecraft RTX Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Starfield Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

The Last of Us Part One Benchmarks — Ryzen 7 9850X3D PBO

Quick and Dirty Gets the Job Done

As mentioned, flicking on PBO and setting a boost override of +200MHz is about as easy as overclocking gets. Even within PBO, you have access to Curve Optimizer and Curve Shaper to squeeze as much performance out of the silicon as possible, either across all cores or on a per-core basis. And that’s before manually tuning your memory.

PBO is dynamic, so the boost override of an extra 200MHz simply allows the CPU to scale to higher frequencies if the workload demands it. It’s not a flat overclock, and that behavior is important here. As you can see consistently throughout both stock and OC performance, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and 9800X3D top out around 5.4GHz on average in games, with only a handful of cases where they crack the 5.5GHz barrier. These chips are capable of hitting higher clocks with PBO, which I confirmed before running any games. It’s just that gaming as a workload doesn’t demand those clock speeds from these two chips.

Even lightly-threaded games like Counter-Strike 2 don’t see a linear increase as the clock speed increases. In games that scale better to higher thread counts, like Cyberpunk 2077, the differences are dulled further. And in GPU-bound titles like Doom: The Dark Ages, they disappear entirely.

Although only $20 separates the Ryzen 7 9800X3D from the 9850X3D at list prices, the 9800X3D has seen price drops in response to AMD’s latest CPU. At the time of writing, it’s available for $443, and over the past week, I’ve seen it for as little as $430. Especially below $450, it’s hard to justify the Ryzen 7 9850X3D over the 9800X3D when the latter offers almost identical performance with PBO enabled. And, although the Ryzen 7 9850X3D can climb higher, that extra clock speed doesn’t amount to much in games — in our suite, it amounts to 0.9%.

Above, you can see the test bench we used for this batch of testing, which is identical to the system we used for our Ryzen 7 9850X3D review in both hardware and software. As usual, we tested with EXPO/XMP turned on, ReBAR enabled, and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) turned off.

Welcome, my name's Splave, or Allen Golibersuch, and I am a professional overclocker. You may have read some of my previous articles on Tom's Hardware, or spotted me in a YouTube video or two. In this column, I will delve into extreme overclocking and muse about what it's like to run your own bespoke system integrator business. But first of all, if you're not acquainted with who I am or what I do, here's an introduction.

For me, overclocking started as just a hobby, but a fairly serious one. I would jet across the world to events like Computex and other live events, winning or placing across overclocking competitions. Unfortunately, not many places or people were willing to pay folks to overclock hardware. Shocking, I know. After some experimentation with launching my own bespoke PC, I knew that I didn't ever want to just sell normal PCs. I wanted to make performance computers that are better than what's out there for a similar price, where my overclocking talents could be used as an added benefit, not merely a pricing burden.

That's when a company I had a long-time relationship with approached me, and asked if they could take a percentage share of ownership and invest in launching my own brand of PCs. It all initially started as a very boutique operation, but eventually rolled over into a full-on system integrator, which is where I am today. Do you know how many Fractal Design cases you can fit into a garage? Asking for a friend.

Anyway, at this point, building and tinkering with PCs isn't just my hobby, or my work, it's my love. I hope you enjoy the forthcoming columns on Tom's Hardware Premium, where I get a chance to stretch my legs and wax lyrical about the things I love.

For the inaugural edition of Splave's Cave, I pick apart a very special graphics card, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090. Yes, the 5090 came out months ago, and yes, there is a gold version, which I sadly do not own. But while the GPU I'm using isn't made of real gold, it's capable of capturing world-record gold. Here's how I set a 3DMark Port Royal World Record. Don't catch your fingers on that silicon, because it's about to get cold.

While I hate to be late to the party, a lot of work goes into overclocking top-tier hardware. Luckily, Asus has crafted an incredibly performant graphics card, with excellent R&D and overclocking departments that work hard on providing workarounds for the protections that any GPU might have. Yeah, those protections, the ones that make sure that the cards don't go boom or catch fire. We're finally in a place where those protections have extended far enough that we can pull out some wild performance from these GPUs at sub-ambient temperatures.

But, there is one thing: You can't try this specific technique at home. I am using a special, non-public BIOS for the GPU that offers a much higher power limit than the standard one would allow. I want to be fully transparent about this, and I'm sorry, but if you want to acquire the BIOS, it's not mine to give out. With that in mind, I know what I am doing, and I am fully prepared to smoke an incredibly expensive graphics card.

There are still challenges without power limits

Equipped with the bespoke BIOS, another challenge awaits. Even if the GPU's standard power limits are removed, thermal limits remain a bottleneck. If you let your card get super hot, it's going to still lower its clock speed in an attempt to avoid outright failure. So, this bespoke BIOS with its extended power limits is practically useless without sub-ambient cooling. For the standard OC BIOS, there's plenty of headroom, which the ROG Astral RTX 5090's cooler is equipped to handle; many cards can run +2000 MHz memory speeds without additional cooling, which is a feat of engineering in itself.

Simply put, the card is incredible. I've been doing this for a long time, and Asus' latest effort is head-and-shoulders above the next-best card I have touched. I'm not trying to wax lyrical about Asus because I am "glazing," as the kids like to say; they've really earned it, and I have nothing negative to say about it at all. The GPU is heavy because the cooler is so well designed. It commands a pricing premium because the components used within it are premium. It runs quietly and looks elegant and discreet. The Asus ROG Astral 5090 just shows up and does work; it's a real powerhouse of a GPU.

The 5090 die doesn't like being cold

Despite all of that fantastic engineering and being equipped with a custom BIOS, the GPU hates being cold. When using liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 starts misbehaving at around -10°C to -20°C. By misbehaving, I mean that the screen goes black, the system hangs, and you have to wait until the card is above 0°C before you can boot it back into Windows — otherwise known as a 'cold bug.'

This is one of those situations where I just have to take a step back, take a deep breath, turn around toward my punching bag, and away from the expensive electronics, to let off some steam for a few minutes.

But, not liking the cold isn't an issue specific to Asus' ROG Astral 5090; it's an Nvidia issue. The RTX 5090 die itself doesn't like being cold, with users of other brands reporting similar experiences. Situations like this make me feel like we could really use a Kingpin right about now. He always had a way to finesse Nvidia into fixing cold bug issues, which isn't something a basement hobbyist can achieve.

Impressive results, despite limitations

But, with that being said, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 can still pull off some pretty impressive feats, without reaching extremely cold temperatures; this card could hit core clock speeds of 3600MHz+.

For comparison, the Asus ROG Matrix 4090, the first GPU to run at over 4 GHz, required cooling down to -190°C to accomplish that feat. Now, just imagine if the RTX 5090 could come close to running at those temperatures, it would simply be absurd. I know that Asus is exploring ways to overcome the cold limits of the RTX 5090 die, and I'll keep testing the new BIOSes they send my way. Hopefully, any amount of additional cold temperature tolerance will yield even greater results.

Meanwhile, with the card safely idling at -20°C, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 demands over 1,000 watts of power when you start a benchmark. This spikes the temperature from -20°C to +10°C instantly, and that's with a five-pound copper pot filled with LN2 attached to it. Whatever the case may be with the cold, the GPU has significant thermal demands, given the amount of power it's sucking up.

This can be tricky to maintain throughout the benchmarking process. If the benchmark ends before you taper down on pouring the LN2, it will drop from +20°C all the way to -50°C instantly when there is no load. That means more black screens, more time waiting to get it back to 0°C, and yes, you'll have to start over and attempt the benchmark again. Needless to say, that punching bag I mentioned earlier is getting a lot of use.

Regardless of all those headaches, once you manage to figure out the perfect cocktail of pouring the LN2 throughout the benchmark, and you see the score pop up, it makes the entire effort worthwhile. After a good amount of trial and error, I was able to set a 3DMark Port Royal record with a score over 48,000. A standard RTX 5090 usually achieves around 35,000.

Additionally, I achieved the GPUPI 32B world record and both Unigine Superposition records with the 1080p and 8K configs. These were achieved a little while ago, so it's likely that you'll spot me elsewhere on the leaderboards, too.

That about wraps it up for the first edition of Splave's Cave on Tom's Hardware Premium. Coming up next will be a guide on how to actually set yourself up for extreme overclocking, with a similar setup to the images posted in the article. Keep your eyes peeled, and thanks for reading.

An incredibly ambitious hardware modder with a penchant for both sublime and ridiculous GPU tinkering has boosted an RTX 5050 to nearly 3.5GHz with a camping freezer. The result is clocks boosted to nearly 3.5GHz, a 23% uplift, and a handful of broken world records. This test was performed as part of what Trashbench calls "the dumbest competition on YouTube" in a video about his battle against fellow overclocking YouTuber Clock Bench to see who can push the GeForce RTX 5050 harder.

Determined to win, Trashbench shunt-modded his Gigabyte RTX 5050 card to unlock the card's power limits and crank it as hard as possible. He ended up with a sustained clock rate of 3468 MHz, some 23% increased over the stock 2820 MHz. This pushed the little GB207 GPU to the top of the 3DMark benchmark charts, and indeed, it is probably the fastest GB207 on the planet—for what dubious merit that honor awards. #1 is #1, though, no matter the context.

Thanks to the Techni-Ice freezer and the 60/40 glycol mix, GPU temperatures apparently hovered between -12℃ and 15℃, depending on the benchmark load. The GPU reported a power draw of just 78W, but of course, due to the shunt mod, that value is completely inaccurate. Shunt mods work by replacing or bypassing the sensing resistors on the GPU's +12V lines, so the card isn't able to detect its own power consumption correctly; this has the effect of unlimiting the power, so you're only capped by voltage and thermal limits.

With a freezer like the one Trashbench used, then, you're really only limited by the voltage the card can supply, which is exactly how he achieved his impressive 23% overclock. To be frank, 23% doesn't sound like all that much to this greybeard's ears, but the days of 100% overclocks are sadly long gone; most modern GPUs struggle to achieve 10% even with a shunt mod.

I've always said that Australians and Texans are kindred spirits. There's no mystery here: we both like our humor dry and a little disturbing, we both tend to minimize even mortal peril, and we both share a love of self-reliance. These qualities manifest in many ways, but one of the most visible is our willingness to rig up just about anything to make a point, like ol' mate Trashbench, who was also the bloke responsible for the world-record Intel Arc B580 overclock about two weeks ago. That card wasn't modified beyond replacing the cooling, though.

Buc-ee's trucker hats off to Trashbench for his achievement; it's readily recognizable redneck ingenuity from the other side of the planet.

GPU overclocker TrashBench set a world overclocking record on an Intel Arc B580 GPU with a relatively simple setup. Instead of employing exotic solutions like liquid nitrogen, used by other overclockers to hit world records, he instead slapped on a pond pump and filled the custom loop with a 50/50 glycol mix of vehicle antifreeze that had been pre-chilled in a freezer. To his surprise, the GPU hit an incredible -17 degrees Celsius (that’s 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit), allowing him to push the performance of Intel’s top-of-the-line consumer GPU. According to the YouTube video, the car-coolant-chilled graphics card achieved a 3DMark Time Spy score of 16,631 — some 12% higher than a stock GPU, breaking the world record for the B580.

The mods TrashBench made to the GPU were rather simple, with the most complicated part being 3D-printing a custom mount to secure the water block. Trashbench notes that antifreeze remains liquid until roughly -25C, and he chilled the liquid in his freezer, which took it down to -17C. From there, he ran a couple of flexible tubes into an open cooler containing the pre-chilled glycol mix and turned on the pump to circulate it, allowing the graphics card to reach sub-zero temperatures.

TrashBench broke a world record in 3DMark Time Spy when the coolant was still cold.

He also tested the Intel Arc B580 in its stock configuration, with the card hitting 2,850 MHz on air cooling alone. This delivered an average of 54, 158, and 107 FPS for Monster Hunter Wilds, Forza Horizon 5, and Cyberpunk 2077, respectively. But with the GPU running on sub-zero cooling, it achieved 3,316 MHz — some 446 MHz over stock performance or a 16.4% higher clock speed. Unfortunately, because the coolant eventually warmed up during testing, TrashBench wasn’t able to maximize its performance, but even so, the card still hit 69, 174, and 120 FPS in the three titles, giving it an average of 16% more FPS.

TrashBench's results show that with just air OC, the B580 achieved 3200 MHz, with the card hitting 60 FPS on Monster Hunter Wilds, 119 FPS on Cyberpunk 2077, and 172 FPS on Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p High settings. Although extreme cooling still seems to offer more FPS, it wasn't a huge gain over what you get without any of the hardware modifications.

Immersion cooling is typically associated with large-scale server environments where conventional air-cooled setups are insufficient. Efforts have been made to commercialize the technology, but, of course, enthusiasts wanting to push their hardware will not wait for any revolution—they'll push through to power their own breakthrough.

Such is the story of u/Tra5shL0rd on Reddit, who took to r/nvidia to showcase his crazy DIY immersion cooling apparatus, only with a further twist. In lieu of mineral oil—which is typically used for these endeavours—he dipped his graphics cards in ATF, or Automatic Transmission Fluid, that is used in cars.

The cooling works remarkably simply. The host took a large plastic container in which he put a ROG Strix GTX 1060 stripped down to its PCB and heatsink, connected via a PCIe riser cable to a clean motherboard outside. He poured 2.1 gallons of ATF on top of it, filling the tub about halfway through. Then he installed a submersible pump inside the tub to circulate the fluid, which was connected to an external pump that facilitated the exchange of hot ATF for cold. That was the first loop.

The second loop involved taking the aforementioned warm ATF and running it through a Dodge Journey transmission cooler, which acted essentially as a radiator to cool it down. The chilled fluid then flows back into the tub, completing the loop and actually creating something akin to a real car's internal mechanism. It's wild, and entirely non-practical, but it's exactly the kind of thing hobbists enjoy.

1080Ti overclock, powered by Dodge motors and Valvoline. from r/nvidia

TrashBench, as the tinkerer is called over on YouTube, ran some benchmarks, and the results were great. Across various gaming and synthetic tests, he saw a consistent improvement of about 10%, and up to 16% in 3DMark. This was attributed in large part thanks to the 2160MHz boost clock that the GTX 1060 was able to achieve, surrounded by ATF, up from 1886MHz stock speeds. Overall, a resounding success that netted 1st place in Firestrike global scores.

Curiously, a 1080 Ti was also thrown into the mix with a similar teardown of the Strix variant, but these results were milder. The 1080 Ti was running at around 1960 MHz with air cooling, but it pushed to 2114 MHz when cooled with the ATF. TrashBench saw a roughly 7% increase in FPS, but because the 1080 Ti is already a power-hungry GPU with minimal headroom, this was not as impressive. The GTX 1060 more than doubled the 1080 Ti's gain and ultimately emerged as the real winner.

All in all, it was a fun experiment, but it left a whole lot of mess. TrashBench even specifically advises against using ATF, as it stains everything and is a nightmare to clean, which is something you'll be busy with since transmission fluid will get into every nook and cranny of your hardware. The Reddit post ends with a tip of the hat to Dodge, who helped power this cooling system with their transmission cooler. The ATF was from Valvoline, who unfortunately missed the shout-out.

Graphics card enthusiast TrashBench has created a video pitching the venerable flagship of the Pascal era against the ‘turnip’ of the Blackwell era, with unexpected results. The ‘Voltage first. Questions later.’ Aussie explains that he set out to “overclock a GTX 1080 Ti hard enough to embarrass Nvidia’s new RTX 5050.” However, things didn’t turn out as planned, with the 5050 grasping an unexpected triumph both at stock and with its impressive overclockability.

TrashBench’s plans regarding the GTX 1080 Ti didn’t get off to the best start with two samples of this old flagship having to be cast aside before finding one that could muster anything more than stock performance. Apparently, it took “days” to get the selected card to perform, with fine-tuning of curves, offsets, drivers, and APIs used – and a custom coolant loop – to rouse this respected champ of old.

We all get old, but TrashBench says that there was a brick-wall limit at 2.2 GHz for the best 1080 Ti he had on hand. Sadly, there are only so many rocket pods you can fit to an old silicon Zimmer frame before it topples over. At this stage of the video, it is admitted that the original “1080 Ti beats 5050 idea was dead.” Actually, things would be turned upside down.

Plucky little RTX 5050 overclocked to 3.3 GHz

Attempting to give the RTX 5050 a fighting chance, TrashBench also boosted this little card’s cooling far beyond stock. As the water block he had was too large for the tiny 5050, a tower CPU cooler was applied to the GPU, with a fat fan attached.

The RTX 5050 came out fighting with TrashBench seeing a 3.3 GHz core clock, a 28% increase on the stock speeds. The extra shot of speed, coming from purely “raw offset” tweaking, precipitated a very respectable 17.55% gain, on average, in the handful of games TrashBench tested for this comparison. Compare that to the extra average uplift of just 3% TrashBench could achieve by tuning the old GTX 1080 Ti.

TrashBench, an overclocking and BIOS tuning enthusiast, has pushed the old favorite Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 to 2,202 MHz using a DIY cooler. The Redditor and TechTuber stuck to the aging GeForce’s stock BIOS and stock voltage, but the home-made copper pipe cooling can only be reasonably described as ‘something else.’ Aesthetics aside, the cooler propelled this card to a stunning five-fold victory in the official 3DMark Fire Strike chart (for systems packing a Core i5-12600KF).

With their trusty old Asus GTX 1060 6GB in hand, TrashBench removed the stock cooler and prepared for the GPU refit by crushing an assortment of copper piping lengths, acquired from a home DIY store, for better component contact.

Next, the now adjusted lengths of copper pipe were positioned over strategic areas of the PCB (VRMs, VRAM), and G-clamped in place. A water block and pump were attached to the GPU, and flexible pipes included the copper lengths in a loop – fed by a sizable jerry can of iced water for the reservoir.

With the DIY cooler setup ready to roll, and sensibly attached some distance from the host PC using a lengthy riser cable, TrashBench started work. Fiddling with the curves in MSI Afterburner, they walked the GPU clocks up, while monitoring temperatures. “I ended up with a pretty clean 2,202 MHz on the core stable enough for a full Firestrike run, and a score good enough to crack into the global Top 5 for GTX 1060s and a 12600kf,” noted TrashBench. But we notice they subsequently got six of the top six scores – even better.

13% faster performance

An Asus ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 has been shunt modded, resulting in its performance eclipsing the $10,000 RTX Pro 6000. This kind of PCB surgery mod is notorious for resulting in damaged graphics cards, so please monkey-see monkey-do with extreme caution. However, the video of this particular feat was put together by overclocking legend Der8auer, so everything went extremely smoothly and to plan. Below, we will ponder over the process, the results, and consider whether the work and risks are worth it.

Shunt mod – a procedure to increase the hardware power limit

As briefly mentioned above, shunt modding can be dangerous to the life of your GPU. If mistakes are made, your $$$ GPU could degrade slowly, or become toast extremely quickly. As well as any concerns about the actual mod to the PCB, remember that any strain on the 16-pin power connector could become even more perilously high at 800W.

A great shunt mod candidate

Der8auer told viewers that he waited until he could get a capable AiO card for this shunt mod experiment, as it should be better at handling the greater power. And indeed, the Asus ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 runs quieter than the ‘vanilla’ Astral, according to the overclocker. All else being equal, the Astral cards offer a welcome degree of parameter adjustment and monitoring options via Asus GPU Tweak III – this will be useful later.

First things first, Der8auer set a baseline for out-of-the-box Astral LC RTX 5090 performance. During this initial assessment, he observed that it was hitting the standard 600W power target constantly when under load, but seemed “pretty quiet” and capable of handling more juice. It was concluded by the OC expert that the 600W limit was definitely reducing OC potential.

Now the decision had been made and baselines recorded – it was time to crack open the LC and mod the PCB. We won’t get into the details of how to shunt mod, but you can see an overview of the procedure in the video embedded above. But in brief, the mod is rather straightforward. It simply requires changes to be made to the resistors coming from the power connector to ‘fool’ the controlling circuitry into thinking less power is coming in to the PCB than there actually is... With the resistor replacements Der8auer chose, the mod would allow “us in theory to get about 30% higher power draw without the card noticing.” Thus, a separate piece of hardware, called WireView, would be used to see the actual power draw. In the case of the Astral cards, you also have pin sensing on the 16-pin power input, so that is another view of the incoming power that is available, and should remain useful.

Results and conclusion

At Computex, extreme overclocker SkatterBencher pulled off a shocking feat, shattering the GPU frequency world record, not with a discrete powerhouse like the RTX 5090, or even the RX 9070 XT for that matter, but with an integrated GPU from Intel. That's right! The overclocker pushed the built-in graphics on his Core Ultra 9 285K to an astonishing 4.25 GHz, with the voltage maintained at 1.7V and a freezing temperature of -170 degrees Celsius.

The GPU overclocking database maintained by SkatterBencher is dominated by discrete GPUs like the RTX 4090 and RX 6900 XT, and that's exactly what you would expect. Splave has previously uncovered that Arrow Lake boasts substantial overclocking potential and headroom, even though performance in general tasks is considered middling. In the run-up to these record attempts, SkatterBencher achieved a respectable 3.1 GHz at 1.3V; however, the primary instinct for any enthusiast overclocker is "How fast can I push this thing?" and that's precisely what he did.

The clock for the built-in graphics on Arrow Lake is based on half the SoC reference clock, which defaults to 100 MHz. This value is then multiplied by the GT ratio, typically at 40x, resulting in an operating frequency of 2 GHz, or a theoretical maximum of 4.25 GHz at 85x. SkatterBencher discovered that Arrow Lake scales better with temperature as opposed to voltage, where at 1.3V, the GPU clocks at 3.1 GHz (30 degrees Celsius), increasing to 3.6 GHz at -150 degrees Celsius.

The roadmap was set; the overclocker aimed for 1.6- 1.7V alongside a frigid -170 degrees Celsius to breach the 4 GHz barrier. Throwing LN2 at the chip isn't all that simple, however, as Splave previously discovered, the system seldom doesn't boot up if the SoC Tile hits -100 degrees Celsius or lower. Even so, with the help of Asus's in-house overclocker Shamino and the Asus ROG Z890 Apex motherboard, SkatterBencher achieved a record-breaking frequency of 4.25 GHz, as reported in GPU-Z.

The next goal was to gauge performance across a suite of benchmarks and games. For a more consistent and stable experience, the GPU was overclocked to 3.9 GHz at 1.6V and -160 degrees Celsius, coupled with DDR5-8600 RAM. Overclocking the Intel GPU yielded substantial performance improvements. In Novabench, it delivered double the stock performance. Gaming benchmarks showed a jump from 50 FPS to 86 FPS in Counter-Strike 2, and a boost from 25 FPS to 42 FPS in Black Myth: Wukong.

Within just a month, the PC enthusiast community has already flashed the base RX 9070 with the XT's vBIOS, as reported by PCGH. In this instance, the increased TGP and clock speeds net a solid 15-20% uplift over the base configuration, and with some tuning, the RX 9070 can approach or even surpass its XT equivalent. While this is a fun experiment with tangible benefits, remember that modding your GPU's vBIOS will likely void any warranty and carries a number of risks, like bricking your GPU.

As shown in the benchmarks below, the base RX 9070 is quite power-starved, limited to a 220W TGP compared to the 304W TGP design on its XT brethren. The clock speeds also take a significant hit, dropping from 2.97 GHz (reference) to 2.52 GHz (reference). A member of the PCGH community successfully flashed his Asus Prime RX 9070 with the vBIOS of the Asus Prime RX 9070 XT, clearing the power and frequency blockade. This effectively bumped the power draw to 317W, with the boost clocks up in the 3.1 GHz range.

Across the 3DMark suite, the modded RX 9070 coupled with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D consistently achieves 15-20% higher performance than similar non-modded configurations. In addition, with some overclocking and tuning, it is reported that the user managed to beat a stock RX 9070 XT. As might be expected, some minor instabilities were observed. AMD's ULPS (Ultra Low Power State) not working was one such issue.

Both Nvidia and AMD have tightened restrictions on vBIOS modifications in recent years. Such modding is especially tricky with Nvidia's hardware, owing to a vBIOS signature check that started with the Maxwell generation, primarily to prevent fraud and scams.

With previous AMD GPU generations like Vega and RDNA 1, the firm used the same underlying chip for its top two GPUs, differentiating them mainly through disabled hardware shaders and software-locked clock speeds. Much of the same saga repeats with RDNA 4, and the mere $50 price difference makes the RX 9070 seem like an obvious upselling tactic for the RX 9070 XT.

The software aspect of earlier gen limitations could be overcome by flashing the vBIOS, allowing many Vega 56 cards to perform like Vega 64s, while bringing RX 5700 performance up to RX 5700 XT levels. However, since the missing shaders are likely fused off on the hardware level, they cannot be re-enabled through software.

If you decide to take your GPU for a spin, be aware of the obvious dangers of vBIOS modding. Likewise, keep an eye on your core, memory, and VRM temperatures as you'd be pushing over 300W across a board that's likely not designed with that figure in mind.

PC overclocking and hardware expert Roman ‘Der8auer’ Hartung has shared his before-and-after AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D delidding test results. His conclusion: enthusiasts can expect up to 10% higher performance with direct-die cooling, but the cost will be significantly higher power consumption. Alternatively, Der8auer observed that users could run the delidded CPU at stock settings and enjoy far lower temperatures, around 23 degrees Celsius lower in this case, plus improved efficiency. A comfortable compromise might be found between these sampled extremes.

In the above video we see Der8auer introduce the awesome AMD Ryzen 9950X3D, then establish a baseline performance / thermal profile, before the delidding operation. Subsequently, he used the same liquid cooler, settings, and benchmarks to see what benefits the delidding process could deliver.

During the delidding process, Der8auer provided some sage advice. He used the still-compatible Delid-Die-Mate Ryzen 7000 device for the 9950X3D. Please take your time ‘wiggling’ the HIS, perhaps up to 100 times, “until it falls off by itself,” plead the overclocker. An example of a rush job he shared (reproduced below) should be warning enough for would-be delidders to be patient.

The overclocking expert published two charts with the before and after delidding performance and power consumption on show. In the Cinebench R23 multi-thread tests chart, which we embedded below, you can see a key takeaway: the delidded Ryzen X3D chip could deliver up to 9% better performance in this productivity benchmark. However, it is questionable whether the 73% increase in power consumption would be worth it. Der8auer also tested Counter Strike 2 4K during his video, and provided a similar chart.

If you buy the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D but don't feel driven to wring every-last-ounce of performance out of it – Der8auer notes that the delidded CPU can run much cooler at stock settings. He seemed impressed that his sample could run at 65 degrees Celsius under load – which is a temperature reduction of 23 degrees Celsius compared to the CPU as shipped from AMD with IHS ‘octopus’ attached. This modded chip also ran at 290W under load, using about 20W less power than the original chip.

If you are interested in more 9950X3D delidding news, we recently retold the hair-raising tale of an ‘amateur’ delidding one of AMD’s best CPUs for gaming using some fishing line and a clothes iron - plus nerves of steel.

A PC overclocking enthusiast says that they successfully delidded their AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D with just a length of fishing line and a clothes iron. VideoCardz spotted Redditor UserBhoss asserting that the operation went smoothly, and that they saved $60 and the waiting time that ordering a Thermal Grizzly Delid Die Mate would have required.

They wrote that “boy was it scary,” so there’s the cost of shredded nerves to account for.

First in the subreddit? 9950X3D Delid and Direct Die! from r/overclocking

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D is a highly desirable gaming and productivity processor, as well as a rather expensive piece of tech, so UserBhoss was rightfully nervous when following a makeshift delidding procedure without specially crafted tools.

Current AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D price = $699.99
Compatible Delid Die Mate Amazon price = $54.90

Put off by the cost and wait involved with acquiring proper delidding hardware, UserBhoss says they “did the clothes iron fishing string method.” Later the redditor specified that “Seaguar 15lb 0.11 diameter” fishing line was chosen, which “didn’t snap once.” We are more familiar with DIYers using dental floss for this purpose.

The Redditor provided some further insights into their personal delidding experience, which was apparently their “first ever delid for a CPU.” The process began by using the fishing line to cut through the adhesive between the ‘octopus’ IHS legs and the chip's substrate.

Then, it was time to wield the clothes iron, to heat up the IHS and melt the solder AMD uses to stick this metal to the chip beneath. Holding the iron on the processor for “2-3 seconds, about 5-7 times” resulted in the IHS easily sliding off. Lastly, liquid metal was used to remove most of the remaining indium.

The overclocking enthusiast did actually have some Thermal Grizzly gear to hand for the next step. They employed a TG Direct Die Frame to correctly join the exposed silicon with a custom loop CPU liquid cooling system.

“Overall she works perfect, able to hit ALMOST 6,000 MHz overclocked, 5,942 MHz to be exact, perfectly stable.” UserBhoss asserts. “Hits about 72-73 in FurMark CPU burner, which is pretty good.”

AMD's newest RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards are setting the gaming world on fire, or they would be if not for limited supply and MSRP markups. For the lucky few who managed to get their hands on the cards, the 9070 XT can seemingly edge past Nvidia's RTX 5080 in real-world performance, thanks only to undervolting the card.

YouTube overclockers Der8auer and Alva Jonathan have shown off the most impressive boosts on the RX 9070 and 9070 XT this week. By only adjusting the power target and undervoltage curves of the GPUs in software, both YouTubers saw 10% boosts to FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 on both cards. Of note is that both of these boosts came without adjusting the GPU clock speed offset in software. The GPUs' clock speeds did increase thanks to the undervolt, but the offset remained unedited.

Both YouTubers tested with testbenches different enough that we should add a disclaimer that the above table does not portray a fair comparison between the RX 9070 XT and 9070 (slightly different CPUs and RAM were used between both Der8auer and Jonathan's testing arrays), but the RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT as tested by Der8auer were on equal testing ground.

Der8auer tested with the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil, which sits near the pinnacle of RX 9070 XT factory-overclocked models. Interestingly, testing with increased clock speed offsets did not make any difference in his measured clock speeds or performance, likely because the card is already overclocked to its board limit from the factory. Overclocking the GPU's VRAM also resulted in higher clock speeds, but lower in-game performance; this is due to built-in error correction on the VRAM recalculating failed errors rather than displaying bad voxels.

Der8auer found the best results through increasing the GPU's power target to 110%, and then applying a GPU voltage offset of -170mV, allowing the RX 9070 XT to hit 3.36 GHz and see a 10% boost in FPS over a similar XTX-brand RX 9070 XT.

With AMD's Radeon software, undervolting a GPU does not simply lower the voltage it runs at. Instead, changing the voltage offset moves the voltage-frequency curve higher or lower, thus lowering the voltage required to hit higher frequencies. A fair comparison would be tuning a car's automatic transmission so a lower RPM is needed before automatically shifting to the next gear.

Alva Jonathan's testing used the ASRock RX 9070 Steel Legend, another heavily factory-overclocked model. Like Der8auer, adjusting GPU clock offsets did not result in much change for Jonathan, who also employed a similar voltage and power draw adjustment to hit a matching 10% boost in FPS. He also employed similar means to undervolt and under-power the board to hit the lowest power draw possible, a solid method for preserving the lifetime of the GPU.

Remember that both YouTubers tested with cards heavily overclocked from the factory, and (normally) selling for well above MSRP. The PowerColor Red Devil initially sold for $799 on Newegg, $200 above MSRP for the RX 9070 XT at launch. Likewise, the ASRock Steel Legend board was listed at $640, a cool $90 above MSRP for the RX 9070. With these markups comes better PCBs and much-improved cooling, which may be the silver bullet allowing for such aggressive undervolts to remain stable.

Still, in the magical Christmas land where new GPUs sell for MSRP, the PowerColor Red Devil still sits $200 cheaper than the RTX 5080, and can now surpass it in Cyberpunk 2077 (and a few other benchmarks which can be seen in Der8auer's testing) after some creative overclocking and tweaking. While ray-tracing, path-tracing, and software support are all Nvidia's games to lose, AMD puts up stiff competition with this undervolting-capable card — and does it without needing to be bundled with a smoke alarm.

CPU frequency world records continue to be set, but not by Intel's new Core 200S processors. A Chinese user, "wytiwx", has pushed the Intel i9-14900KF past 9.12 GHz, officially seizing the crown from Elmor. Fun fact: HWBot's data shows that, to date, Elmor has been the only person to breach the 9 GHz territory, but not anymore.

The test bench that enabled this feat is powered by the i9-14900KF with all E-cores disabled and hyperthreading turned off. The setup was paired with the Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex and 16GB of DDR5 memory. The overclocker opted for the Windows 7 (6.1) Operating System which is surely an interesting choice.

Normally, the i9-14900KF wields an iGPU-less configuration with 24 cores (eight P and sixteen E) and 32 threads with an out-of-the-box turbo clock of 6 GHz. This processor stands as Intel's fastest gaming CPU; only to be dethroned by AMD's top X3D counterparts. These X3D CPUs have been the Achilles' heel for Intel, though Team Blue actually has an answer to AMD's V-Cache technology; just not for consumers.

With a core voltage of 1.387V and likely under Liquid Nitrogen or Helium, the i9-14900KF managed to hit 9.121 GHz, dethroning the previous world record by the thinnest of margins at just 4 MHz. So, it probably won't be long until Elmor steps in to reclaim his crown. While the i9-14900KS might seem like the go-to for overclocking, it is essentially just a better-binned variant of the i9-14900K.

The Raptor Lake lineup, excluding the degradation fiasco, was Intel's first series to supersede AMD's Piledriver FX-8350 after 12 years. Again, these record-breaking overclocks are impressive but not indicative of how silicon performs in the real world since they involve exotic cooling solutions and extreme settings.

That said, Arrow Lake also has decent overclocking potential when it comes to memory. The newer process node and disaggregated layout might limit peak core clock potentials, but that's a tradeoff for better efficiency. Nonetheless, 25 years ago, Intel said we'd have 10 GHz CPUs by 2005... Frequency isn't the be-all and end-all of CPU performance but that same 10 GHz barrier will be the next major milestone for the overclocking community.

Intel’s Arrow Lake has tremendous memory overclocking potential — as I’ll outline below. I was able to set the world memory overclocking frequency record at an insane DDR5-12666 — and some dead-simple tuning tips can help improve performance even for regular builds. However, the new chip design presents plenty of challenges for both standard and professional overclockers alike. Below, I’ll cover the most important learnings on boosting performance with standard cooling and with the more extreme liquid nitrogen.

Tiles come to desktop PCs

Like it or not, regardless of what you call them, tiles, chiplets, or silicon “chonks,” are the future. Having a single, large monolithic chip die is not a sustainable path, and Intel is at the end of what's possible on refining its existing process and increasing clock speeds like we saw with the 12th- to 14th-Gen cpus.

Enter Arrow Lake. Unlike AMD’s chiplets, which have a big space between them, Intel’s approach is to arrange the tiles directly next to each other. If you look at it cross-eyed, it looks just like a Raptor Lake chip. I'm not an electrical engineer nor a semiconductor architect, but I assume everything is physically close together so that the die-to-die interconnects are short and fast.

Think of asking your partner in the next room to bring you a sandwich versus yelling at your neighbor three houses down to bring you one. Your partner will bring it faster, and they know what you like, so it will taste better also.

This is similar to how latency works, which is one of the things Arrow Lake could improve on. With tiles, even if you have fast interconnects, they just can't physically offer the performance of on-die interaction. The memory controller being on a different tile than the cores is the main cause of this latency issue. We’ll come back to this when we talk about liquid nitrogen overclocking.

There are some questionable choices, too. Where is my HyperThreading?! This is outrageous!. Hyperthreading, for the uninitiated, essentially doubles your threads and gives a ~15-30% performance gain vs. “real” threads in heavy workloads. Hyperthreading was always essentially free (for the user) performance; there was never a reason to shut it off.

I think the fact that HyperThreading is missing makes this product worse than if it had it. Again, I'm not an architect, but I would assume this choice was based on cost. Adding complexity adds cost to an already expensive, TSMC-made product, and perhaps a choice was made for a little extra margin vs a little extra performance.

I really hope we don't keep seeing companies trending toward decisions like these from the top down. If hyperthreading was there, I am positive reviews would generally be much more complimentary, and the chip would easily be a more viable contender in the space, and we could put Raptor Lake fully behind us.

The positive? In times like these, where negativity and greed run rampant, it’s often more constructive to find the good, or at least plaster on a half smile and bear some optimism through your gritted teeth. Lucky enough for Intel (and AMD), we live in a nearly polarized bubble. Many people will never buy an AMD chip, and many people will never buy an Intel chip. You can give them facts and teach them that loyalty does not help you in these cases; it does not matter.

Quick and simple tips for enthusiasts

There is plenty to like, but it will take some time with the platform and proper educating.

With Arrow Lake, the quickest and easiest way to improve performance is to overclock the NGU (uncore) and the D2D (die-to-die) multipliers. On a high end motherboard, you don't even need to adjust the voltages. The NGU default ratio is 26x, but it can easily do 34x+. The D2D default is 21x, and it can easily do 34x+ without touching anything else. This will net you 2-20% in performance gain, depending on the workload! We haven't even touched the core clocks yet, but we are getting gains. That is positive! Intel…maybe you can raise the defaults of these values for people who are afraid of the BIOS.

For Arrow Lake, we have now been introduced to DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator). This is Intel’s new power management tech to “improve power delivery, efficiency, and thermal management in various applications.” It’s an efficient brain inside the CPU. One of the best decisions that Intel made on these CPUs was to allow you to work with DLVR, give it offsets, and allow it to adapt in the ways you want it to, OR, if you are below 10C, totally bypass it.

Bravo to Intel for spending extra time validating both ways of controlling the CPU, as bypass mode is necessary for sub-ambient cooling to easily max out the CPU. This gives you basically any amount of control you desire, for better or for worse. DLVR is easily something they could have forced on us, especially after the 13th and 14th-gen degrade-gate, but they chose not to, and I thank you on behalf of extreme overclocking enthusiasts. Boom, Positive!

Memory Overclocking

The Arrow Lake memory controller is next level. It’s so good, in fact, that it is reaching frequencies high enough to start making Gear 4 (memory controller running at ¼ the RAM) a viable option. Previously, in almost every scenario, it was always best to remain in Gear 2 (memory controller running at ½ the RAM) unless you were going for an E-Peen memory validation WR (Arrow Lake has the DDR5 world record by a mile), as the latency hit was so bad that it didn’t make up for by the gain in bandwidth. Now we are seeing benchmarks around DDR5-8600 in Gear 2 and DDR5-9733 in Gear 4 — basically neck and neck. Flexibility in memory choices and using previous-generation memory is fine. Oops, still positive!

The meh?

Big.little-style CPUs will always be more beholden to scheduling and OS optimization than non-hybrid-core-style CPUs. This means having Microsoft refine some things, which takes time. I would not be shocked if Windows sees a performance boost soon via an update. Some users are experiencing performance uplift from disabling the P cores, but there is not a world that makes sense in. In theory, hybrid designs make sense, but until both sides are primarily doing it, I think there will be many bugs, such as in the scheduler and otherwise.

I also find it odd that Intel has modified the hold-down mechanism, even though it was never officially stated to have been a problem with Raptor Lake CPUs. A third-party replacement hold-down frame has become a necessary staple for overclockers and enthusiasts because of the flexing caused by the older stock Intel design.

Now, as you can see below, some variants of the socket use a shim for the hold-down brackets with a couple of mm of white plastic. This will lower the force put on the cpu pushing into the socket. Is it effective? I have to say, when removing the heatsinks, the spread of thermal paste is much more even than in previous generations. Will it outperform a frame? I would suspect probably not.

How to “Overclock”

Having spent so much time tuning Arrow Lake, I can tell you that conventional overclocking is still there, but before we even get that far, let’s tweak everything else. You may be surprised by how much you can milk out of the system before even touching the core frequencies. As I said previously, NGU overclocking and D2D overclocking will give a solid performance gain, and memory overclocking and tightening are also very beneficial on Arrow. As you can see in the chart below, going from the default stock system to a system with memory and NGU/D2D overclocked, I am seeing a 2-33% gain in synthetic benchmarks.

Once that framework is laid, I move on to the core overclocking, for which I always prefer a fixed clock rate overclock. As you can see, at 5.6 GHz P-cores and 4.9 GHz E-cores, the fixed clock rate beats even the default turbo 5.7 GHz in single-thread benching. Is this a scheduler or code issue? I don't know. Gaining 8% in Cinebench and 37% in PYPrime 2B is absolutely wild. It’s a great reward for learning the system.

Stock temps for enthusiasts — Liqmax

The Enermax LiqmaxFlo 420mm dominates this Core Ultra 9 285K. At default fan speeds, which make it nearly silent, I see low-80C temperatures. With a full overclock and a tune of the fan profiles, I am only hitting high 70Cs in the Cinebench R23 stress test. With the integrated fan on the block top, I don't even bother using a fan on the VRMs for my bench system. If your case can handle the size of the cooler, then I would recommend picking one up.

It is a monster. I used to rely on a custom loop, but for all the hassle, I can just strap this thing on in one minute, be within a couple of degrees of a custom loop, and then put it away when I’m not using it. It just makes more sense. The fans are the quietest of any AIO that I have tried, and the fan cabling makes things so much cleaner than standard-style cables.

The System

ASRock is a partner of mine, so I always use their stuff. In this scenario, it's the Z890 Taichi OC Formula. Instead of the stand-alone OC Formula branding, it carries the Taichi name as well. I would assume this is how it will be going forward. The Taichi is the mid-high tier, Formula is the OC-focused model, and the Aqua is the water-incorporated bling-bling high-dollar flagship. The OC Formula has many OC features, buttons aplenty, and performance to match the name.

The first thing you notice is the Memory Shield metallic sticker. ASRock states, “ASRock's exclusive Memory OC Shield is a patented feature engineered to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI) that could affect memory overclocking. By shielding memory modules from EMI noise and optimizing the layout, the Memory OC Shield enhances stability and reliability during high-frequency operations, enabling users to push their systems to the maximum potential.”

To me, this reads like early 2000s HiFi / Monster Cable advertisements or those stickers they make for cell phones that “boost your signal by two bars.” I have no way to measure EMI in my basement, so we will just assume it's not all fluff. If I get bored enough this winter, maybe I will try max memory overclocking with the sticker and then peel it off; maybe not. At least we are getting some innovation. The power delivery and memory trace routing, as always, are top-notch, and the motherboard won't be the limiting factor in any of your CPU or memory overclocking endeavors. Sorry, my board is covered in black liquid electrical tape, and I don't use any heatsinks on it.

I only run G.Skill memory. Their support of the entire OC and enthusiast community is unmatched. If you like overclocking, I can't think of a better option. They provided their latest and greatest memory, the Trident Z5 CK Series Overclocked DDR5 CU-DIMM with Clock Driver.

What is a CU-DIMM, and what is CK? “The Trident Z5 CK and Trident Z5 CK RGB series are built on the new CU-DIMM standard, which introduces a built-in clock driver (CKD) chip on the memory module. Designed to strengthen signals between the CPU and memory IC chips, the CKD helps in improving stability in high-speed memory operations.” This allows the memory to run crazy speeds on Arrow Lake easily. This set here is DDR5-9600 — Yes, that is not a mistake.

Power Delivery

I'm running the Enermax Revolution DFX 1650W. I know, with its sizable 112.5Amps on the 12V rail, it could probably handle three of these systems at the same time if it had more 24 and 8-pin connections. Having unlimited power and never worrying whether it is an Arrow Lake or Threadripper makes it nice to just have this sitting here.

It’s under $299 for a 1650W Gold PSU, which is wild to me. They now have beautiful individually sleeved cables that don’t kink and are malleable enough to make smooth bends, and they are fully modular. No ugly zip ties. RGB is controllable and can be shut off if you're a hater.

Cooling — LN2 issues, SOC die cold bug, memory limits on LN2

For the greater part of three months, I have been hammering on Arrow Lake with liquid nitrogen, which is not easy. With tiles usually come cold issues; for Arrow Lake, that cold issue is the SOC tile. It absolutely hates the cold. Around -100C, the system will no longer turn on as, for the sake of chip longevity, the boot-up voltages are super low. Once you are booted up, most of the time, around -160C to -180C seems to be the coldest it will go in most circumstances before it throws errors.

Throw in DLVR vs. Bypass mode, and there are a lot of new things to play with. In general, bypass mode seems to be the best. The thing about bypass mode is that the chip can no longer feed the P-cores, E-cores, and Ring different voltages. They will all be in sync with the highest of the three applied, which you would think is not optimal. In a perfect world, P-cores would like 1.5-1.65V, E-Cores 1.3-1.4V, and the Ring needs little more than stock volts. In bypass mode, all three would get 1.65V, which is pretty spicy.

With these new issues and tile growing pains, liquid nitrogen results are hit or miss. A strong part will do up to 6.9-7 GHz in threaded benchmarks, trailing Raptor Lake’s peak of 7.6 GHz by a decent margin. It does make up for some frequency deficit by having E-Cores that clock higher and are much more efficient.

The missing hyperthreading is a devastating blow to world record and global rankings on HWBot, where Arrow Lake’s 24 cores and 24 threads are in the same category as Raptor Lake’s 24 cores and 32 threads. Regardless, I completed over 30X category gold cups for Core Ultra 9 285k rankings. Not a bad effort.

Now, back to the memory controller. Arrow Lake can pump insane memory frequency on air and liquid nitrogen cooling. I managed to break the DDR5 frequency world record at DDR5-12666! Using the GSKILL Trident and pouring liquid nitrogen on them (well, maybe it's not that easy), and after trying a couple of different CPUs, it all fell into place. Sorry about the football game in the reflection on the memory DIMM below; it was an accident, I swear.

For the record, the memory wanted to be as cold as possible, but the CPU itself only needed to be around -80C. The board being insulated keeps me relatively safe as far as water and shorting things are concerned. It was really fun benching this.

Experiments with drilling the IHS

In my first day's experience with Arrow Lake, I realized that the SoC die was the source of the cold bug problem with liquid nitrogen. The SoC die is conveniently located at the bottom of the CPU, so I had the idea of grinding away the heat spreader as much as I could to see if there was any effectual cold tolerance gained. It’s far from a perfect solution, but when all you have is a Dremel and too much ambition, paired with a disregard for the hardware at hand, it was try to improve things or do nothing.

This modification keeps the liquid nitrogen pot from directly touching the portion of the integrated heat spreader (IHS) that has the SoC tile underneath. Naturally, the IHS still touches the tile, and the solder below obviously still connects everything, but we did gain about 50C of extra cold tolerance on the part! I hope we see some innovative OC guys like Der8aur or Elmor run with this and make something that works 100%, as the theory has proven to benefit.

Media negativity

Arrow Lake, on the whole, has read as seemingly pretty negative. While I can’t argue with all of the points, there are a few I would like to make. I can’t fault reviewers for not spending three months finding performance gains on this platform, especially when most users will never even enter their BIOS.

This is Intel’s most advanced mainstream processor by far. There are so many features and options that we are still finding performance gains daily. In fact, ASRock still sends me BIOS updates every day, and they aren't for bugs; they are for performance and memory tuning. I think there are some things Intel could have stuck their neck out a bit more for and pushed. They could have been a bit more aggressive and have higher default NGU and D2D speeds, but I'm sure there are kid gloves on after recent degrading issues on 13th- and 14th-Gen, so playing it safe might be the call. If you like overclocking and tuning, it really is a fun platform with plenty left on the table for enthusiasts to find.

Writers note: I received the CPU and motherboard from ASRock, Memory from G.Skill, and PSU from Enermax.

🔴 Bonus

If you hold the CPU just right, you may notice what looks to be damage or some other non-uniformity. But don't worry, that is normal. I was informed that those pertain to the PCIe and DMI. It is not an error or pad damage.

Expert overclocker Pieter-Jan Plaisier, AKA ScatterBencher, has again turned his focus to the humble Raspberry Pi. In a recent video walkthrough, the hardcore tech enthusiast prepared a Raspberry Pi 5, alongside a plethora of advanced hardware and software tools, to try and push our favorite single board computer to 4 GHz or beyond. Sadly, ScatterBencher didn’t really achieve what he set out to do, as with all his esoteric cooling craft and lashings of liquid nitrogen he still hit a wall at 3.6 GHz – which had been achievable on a stock device with air cooling.

ScatterBencher’s Raspberry Pi 5 overclocking efforts had previously plateaued at 3.0 GHz on air. Since that time, the expert overclocker consulted with Tom’s Hardware presenter and editor Les Pounder on the Pi Cast. This conversation led him to Jeff Geerling’s guide on the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) Emulation Patch, which we have also discussed on the site, here.

With software alone – the latest Raspberry Pi OS and the NUMA patch, ScatterBencher saw much better results than he had previously achieved. Early in his video, he shows that it was a cinch to move past 3.0 GHz, using only the latest software and simple air cooling. A graph shows he could get the Raspberry Pi to run nearly 30% faster than stock with appropriate air cooling. The Raspberry Pi 5's Broadcom BCM2712 SoC runs at a stock frequency of 2.4 GHz.

Satisfied with the software side of things, ScatterBencher naturally anticipated some further steps up the overclocking ladder, setting up at Elmor Labs Taipei office. The first step was to run the Pi with liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling. Due to the topography of components on the Pi PCB, some LN2 pots that ScatterBencher was familiar with weren’t suitable. However, a thin, tall pot was found which sat nicely on the SoC. A quick test run saw the LN2-cooled Pi SoC achieve 3.2 GHz on LN2, and it could run Geekbench, with no issues.

The overclocking expert gradually increased clocks but found a barrier at 3.6 GHz, after which the Pi would lock up / crash, whatever he did. ScatterBencher adjusted the LN2 cooling down to around -90 degrees Celsius and didn’t get any better results, complaining of a lack of temperature scaling. Below this temperature a Raspberry Pi will exhibit other issues, explained the overclocker, so it is kind of a hard limit in cooling the SBC.

Turning attention to power delivery, ScatterBencher decided to use the Elmor Ample-X1 power card. First, he removed some inductors, added thicker power wires, and then checked everything was still OK. Now, with the Ample-X1 connected and stronger power delivery in place, ScatterBencher could increase voltages above 1.2V – moving the needle up to 1.55V – but again no scaling was achieved...

ScatterBencher pondered why he saw no scaling with lower temperatures, or higher voltages – two of the best tools in an overclocker’s toolbox. He mused whether there was a Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) locking issue, or if there were other components in the SoC that were being unintentionally upclocked but hitting limits.

However, there was still an avenue that had been left unexplored. The standard Raspberry Pi 5 crystal runs at a fixed 54 MHz. This was removed with hot air and replaced with an Elmor Labs ECB (external clock board). Sadly, even with the oscillator adjustments available, ScatterBencher hit the same ‘frequency wall’ of 3.4 GHz for benchmarking, and 3.6 GHz for just running the OS without significant load.

In summary, ScatterBencher found that 4 GHz is a frequency too far for the Raspberry Pi 5. Even with the best tools at his disposal (LN2, power, oscillator mods etc) – only 3.6 GHz was achievable. That’s the same limit he saw with ambient cooling, he said. Nevertheless, the skilled overclocker was happy with the journey – learning more about the Pi, Arm, and Linux on the way.

Asus's Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard recently helpedto break overclocking records with Intel's latest high-end desktop CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K, pushing it all the way to 7.448 GHz while achieving a 12066 MT/s RAM overclock by using a unique liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling setup, featuring an cooler designed by Diabatix and manufactured by 3D Systems. The unique shape of the cooler is due to its intended use for liquid nitrogen overclocking, made to offset the natural Leidenfrost effect which can occur with LN2, forming undesired vapor layers.

This LN2 cooler, initially revealed in July, was partially designed by Diabatix' custom generative AI model and tested with 14th Gen Intel chips prior to being adopted for this Arrow Lake S overclocking run. It's noted as being capable of achieving a thermal resistance of 0.011K/W. LN2 cooling is a notoriously fickle and fragile process, which often means that it's difficult to sustain these workloads for truly practical lengths of time— but optimized solutions like this can allow the system to run more stably, for longer periods, and thus be pushed to yet farther heights.

In Asus' detailing of the overclocking process and results with the whole range of Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, it's noted that its overclockers managed to achieve "5 world records, 19 global first-place records and 31 first-place records" with the help of this cooling setup. The peaks are achieved with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, of course, with the prior-mentioned 7488.7 MHz overclock being done by Elmor and the paired 12066 MT/s RAM overclock being achieved by BenchMarc. The Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K are also pushed impressively far beyond their base levels of performance, but of course the high-end numbers are the most impressive when using such specialized LN2 cooling.

Besides the specialized cooling and CPU in use, the motherboard used to achieve all of this was the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Apex. While average consumers certainly won't have access to all this specialized overclocking equipment, these records do reflect positively on that particular motherboard, though like its predecessor, expect to pay a significant price premium for both the board and the rest of the components you'll need to make the most of it.

An AMD Ryzen 9 9950X has been demonstrated breaking the Cinebench R23 (16 core) world record score. Bilibili tech influencer Ordinary Uncle Tony showcased his liquid nitrogen-fuelled feat, reaching a multi-threaded score of 55,327 points at a live event in China (h/t momomo_us) dubbed China Joy. For some perspective, the current best Cinebench R23 (16 core) score in HWBot’s official chart is 50,843, and it was achieved by seasoned overclocking pro Safedisk using a Ryzen 9 7950X.

As a teaser to his video, Tony asked his fans whether they thought the new Zen 5 flagship could break the current Cinebench R23 world record for 16-core CPUs. Of course, it could. At 55,327 vs 50,843 gen-to-gen. We must also stress that well-known HWBot overclocking rivals will surely go some way beyond this early overclocking feat in due course.

The first recorded Cinebench R32 run we see appears to be one where Tony sets a baseline expectation. He points to a screen showing a 5.0 GHz processor clock, and then we see a Cinebench R23 score of 42,689 points. Tony then turns his attention to a 6.0 GHz clock target. This overclock allows his system to achieve 51,204 points, which is already better than the current 16-core world record.

Pushing things further, we see the 9950X pushed to 6.5 GHz. Tony shows that even with LN2, things are starting to get toasty. A probe screen shows a reading of 165 degrees Celsius… However, this extra push makes a decent impact in Cinebench R23, with the cameras recording a score of 55,327.

The official standard Ryzen 9 9950X base/boost clocks are 4.3 GHz / 5.7 GHz. Earlier in the week, we saw what we thought was an on-air overclock of this chip at 6.0 GHz. With the extra 300 MHz, possibly sustained across all cores, there was a significant 27% performance uplift seen in Geekbench compared with a stock-clocked model’s score leaked previously.

In summary, the upcoming Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, the first to market with AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, look very promising, and we can’t wait to test them in the Tom’s Hardware labs. We were supposed to be busy testing by now, but the Ryzen 9000 delay drama hit us (and everyone else), and it looks like a simple typo contributed to the launch's delay.

Getting accurate data from your Raspberry Pi is easy using the vcgencmd command but this project from SkatterBencher measures every aspect of our favorite single board computer and handily records it to a CSV file. 

The project's creator noticed a lack of comprehensive telemetry tools, noting that others had created their own projects for specific data (just like our project.) Skatterbencher wanted a tool that worked more like HWiNFO, a tool to monitor and record telemetry data during a stress test. While this script doesn't (yet) perform a stress test, it does automatically record multiple datapoints for later analysis.

Written in Python, this script calls the vcgencmd command and provides real-time data on how our Raspberry Pi is performing. We took it for a spin on our Raspberry Pi 5 housed inside Sunfounder's Pironman 5 case.

First of all, we get a plethora of Pi-data written to the Linux terminal. From the data, we know the clock speeds for our Arm CPU, GPU, UART, PWM, and many other interfaces. That Arm CPU temperature is displayed in its own section, just above the voltages for the CPU core and the onboard RAM. Next up we get data on CPU throttling which triggers once the CPU hits 82 degrees Celsius. Lastly, we get data on the PMIC (Power Management IC) which tells us about every aspect of the PMIC. This is especially useful for the new Raspberry Pi 5 which has a beefy PMIC compared to previous models.

All of this data updates every second, so we get a constantly refreshed display. But for those of us who like to pore over the data in a spreadsheet, us included, then fear not, as the data is logged to a CSV file that can be easily imported into Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, or even Google Sheets. The CSV output gives us granular-level data. We can see how our CPU is being used and its speed. We also get the data for PMIC, clocks, and temperature logged to the file every second.

Running the code is a simple matter of cloning the repository.

git clone https://github.com/SkatterBencher/rpi5-telemetry-python.git

Changing directory to the cloned repository, and we can then run the code using Python.

cd rpi5-telemetry-pythonpython telemetry_printCsvWorks_b.py

We get the real-time output and data logged to CSV for later use in a spreadsheet. All it needs now is a stress test option and we may have the perfect tool to stress and record our Raspberry Pis.

The project source can be found on the SkatterBencher GitHub page.

Nvidia will soon release a new beta version of its app, heralded to deliver enhanced AV1 recording and one-click performance tuning. The initial beta release of the Nvidia app came out in February 2024, and the new build will roll out tomorrow (June 4, 2024, at 3am PT).

The app already helps keep your PC drivers for Nvidia GeForce cards up-to-date. However,  it will soon allow one-click GPU optimizations that won’t void your warranty, and will facilitate faster and higher-resolution gameplay recording. In the new app beta, users will be able to record gameplay in 120 frame-per-second AV1 SDR and HDR formats.

On RTX 40 Series graphics cards and laptop GPUs, the update improves encoding efficiency by 40%, allowing for higher-quality videos without sacrificing extra disk space. This is important because recording multiplayer matches and single-player walkthroughs can otherwise consume a vast amount of storage space.

At the same time, playback of 120 fps AV1 videos is substantially better than with H.264. It allows for smoother, more immersive playback at the same bit rates as compared to H.264 captures.

The updated beta also allows owners of RTX desktop graphics cards to monitor and make the most of their GPUs with one-click automatic tuning. The app scans system performance characteristics and then offers tuning profiles that maximize performance without the risk of damaging your GPU or voiding its warranty. This is an important change, as enthusiasts like to tune their GPUs but are naturally wary of warranty repercussions.

Nvidia's new beta app version will also introduce a redesigned in-game overlay and offer new perks for app users. Nvidia app users will be able to redeem three months of access to Microsoft PC Game Pass for free, beginning June 4, at 6am PT.

For those who have already installed the Nvidia app public beta, the new version should be available through the in-app updater as of June 4, at 3am PT. It will also be updated on the app’s website, for gamers and creators not yet running the software.

Not long ago, we covered a world record-breaking overclock of an Intel Core i9-14900KS reaching a whopping 9.1 GHz. In the time since, the team responsible were invited to Intel to hold an extended presentation on how they did it [h/t Skatterbencher]. It's also worth noting that this impressive 9.1 GHz overclock was only achieved on a single P-Core of the Core i9-14900KS CPU in question. The full video presentation is embedded below, and also includes additional historical context and technical information on the achievement.

During the presentation, the most important elements for achieving a world record in CPU overclocking runs are given. These include the use of liquid helium cooling instead of the more well-known and common liquid nitrogen, but also a combination of extreme temperature management and sheer luck that are very difficult, expensive, or both to reproduce. If you've heard of the "silicon lottery" for achieving stable CPU/GPU overclocks, that couldn't apply more to the arena of cutting-edge (but ultimately unstable in the long-term) OCs like this one. For example, the golden sample Core i9-14900KS being used is only 100 MHz better than other lottery "winners".

As one may notice from either the presentation or the header image we used for this write-up, overclocking headroom has trended to a point of extremely diminishing returns since 2007, when 8 GHz was first achieved. While desktop CPUs are continually climbing in overall performance and out-of-box Boost frequencies, it seems obvious that we're starting to run into some serious physical hardware limits trying to achieve 9 GHz and higher.

Even measuring CPU frequency accurately once you're pushing it that high requires a great deal of expertise and even custom software, which SkatterBencher wrote for that exact purpose and discussed during the presentation. Moreover, with the "measuring it" problem potentially solved,  it seems that 10 GHz and higher overclocks won't be achieved on modern CPUs anytime soon.

Who knows, though? Maybe if binding CPUs with diamond becomes common, the toughest cooling and power limits can be overcome and bring us into the world of true 10+ GHz CPUs. In any case, we're grateful to overclocking enthusiasts like SkatterBencher and ElmorLabs who chase these expensive and unwieldy world records. Here's hoping we won't be waiting much longer to see this "unbeatable" record broken, even if it's just by a few hundred Megahertz.

AMD launched a quartet of Ryzen 8000G ‘Phoenix’ APUs for desktops back at CES 2024 but it quickly became apparent that these chips used a thermal paste thermal interface material (TIM). Today, overclocking expert Roman 'Der8auer' Hartung published some tests showing the performance  / temperature improvements available from delidding these new APUs, specifically AMD’s top-of-the-range Ryzen 7 8700G (click to read our review). Impressively, moving from a stock sample to one with a Liquid Metal TIM applied could reduce core temperatures by up to 25 degrees Celsius. Processor performance could also be improved by up to 17%.

At the start of his video, Der8auer highlights that as the Ryzen 8000G processors are more closely related to the mobile parts they use thermal paste rather than a solder TIM. This usually means that delidding the processor and switching the TIM for liquid metal will pay excellent dividends.

Before starting his tests, Der8auer thought it useful to compare the new Ryzen 7 8700G with the tried and trusted Ryzen 9 7950X chip. A quick visual inspection reveals a big difference. There are lots of surface mount components visible on the chip substrate between the octopus legs of the 7950X. On the 8700G, you can only see these types of components by peeping under the IHS.

The visual inspection made Der8auer concerned that the Ryzen 7000 Delid-Die-Mate may be incompatible with Ryzen 8000G chips. However, the delidding process worked flawlessly and was even easier due to the paste TIM. The 8700G was delidded with no damage, so the testing plan could go ahead.

Der8auer tested the Ryzen 7 8700G in three configurations, and with three power / clock strategies. Before delidding he tested a stock 8700G as supplied, with PBO, and with a manual overclock at 5.0 GHz. After delidding he did the same tests using an 8700G which had a KryoSheet between the die and IHS, and finally with Liquid Metal.

He noted that the manually overclocked Ryzen 7 8700G would perform about 5% behind a Ryzen 7 7700X in Cinebench with the 5.0GHz overclock. However, some people will prefer the Phoenix desktop chip due to its strong iGPU.

Seeing the cool performance of the delidded chip using Liquid Metal, Der8auer found that the new sweet spot of the processor for manual overclocking was 5.3 GHz with core temperatures remaining under 80 degrees Celsius. The measured Cinebench performance of this chip was 15 to 17% better than the originally tested stock APU.

Why delid and test an APU like this? Der8auer says he did go through with this project because he likes doing these kinds of things… However, he also reckons that this kind of tinkering could deliver real benefits in some scenarios. For example, in size-constrained systems, where cooler size and design are more limited and where people tend to seek very quiet performance, being able to use a smaller cooler and / or a slower fan speed could be very attractive.

How can you make the best SSDs even better? Overclocking it, of course. Suppose you ever wonder what kind of performance you can expect from an overclocked SSD. In that case, Youtuber Gabriel Ferraz documents the whole process with adequate details to show this process and the performance one could achieve.

Ferraz is doing it out of curiosity, like any hardware enthusiast would, achieving some results with certain limitations and restrictions. The video is interesting as it shows the selection process of the suitable SSD for the job and its result.

The overclocker uses an unknown drive called RZX Pro 240GB DRAM-Less SATA-based SSD for this adventure. He didn't choose an NVMe SSD since these drives already run at their best potential, showing little to no visible performance yield for this experiment. The other reason why he chose this is because of the internal components used in this SSD.

Right Tools For The Right Job

It uses a Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 controller, vital in this overclock. The SM2259XT2 has a single-core ARC 32-bit CPU with a maximum clock speed of up to 550 MHz according to its specification, while this controller was clocked down to 425 MHz. The other benefit is that this controller has two channels with a bus speed of 400 MHz, with eight Chip Enable commands that allow communication with 16 dies via interleaving. This SSD uses a specific 96-layer Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) TLC BiCS4 256Gb NAND, which is also rated to run at 400 MHz and effectively uses 193.75 MHz.

There could be many reasons why this SSD is operating its controller and NAND that lower specification, either for endurance or to maintain a lower power consumption. There's also a chance these chips may not have passed the company's QC standards for multiple reasons, which usually gets sold to smaller-tier SSD makers for local markets.

He also used a specific SATA to USB adapter with a JMS578 bridge controller and a clamp. He's not showing the entire process, so users couldn't do it, voiding their SSD's warranty and any potential issues with respective companies.

This is where the hard part begins. He uses Mass Production Tools to program the SSD using compatible firmware for fine-tuning multiple settings. Naturally, it would require technical knowledge and a series of trial-and-error processes to gain the maximum possible performance while keeping it stable for benchmarking. Ultimately, he got the controller stable at 500 MHz, increasing by 17.6%. But the NAND receives a much more significant boost to 400 MHz, bringing in a 106% increase.

'Shall Thou Reap What He Sowed?'

Gabriel uses CrystalDisk Mark, 3DMark, and PCMark 10 for initial benchmarking. Right off the bat, he could not see sequential read/write performance increase because of SATA III's limitation. This was expected initially, but he noticed a slight latency decrease. What did improve is the drive's random read and write. Random read and write performance increased by 27% and 10%, respectively. 3DMark and PCMark 10 show an increase in performance. It also did not make any difference with Adobe Premiere Pro 2021 and game loading times—the same with the 6.20 GB ZIP file transfer.

Regarding temperature and power draw, he shows the SSD always operates at 40 degrees Celsius under stock settings while the overclocked drive operates at 45 degrees Celcius. The manufacturer programmed the drive to work up to 40 degrees Celsius, making the drive clock itself down when needed to maintain this limit. This also increased the max power draw from 1.16 to 2.01 watts, resulting in lower efficiency overall. Even though the drive was overclocked to operate with higher bandwidth without thermal throttling, its efficiency was reduced to almost half compared to its stock settings. Eventually, the SSD died when he completed his barrage of benchmarks.

This isn't surprising for Gabrielle, as the whole point of this exercise is to see if one can do this at home using simple tools. While he did that, he had the intimate knowledge needed to select the suitable SSD using the right components, tools, and source to get it from. Furthermore, it required specific knowledge to know which settings could be changed. It is also unsurprising that some SSDs will have lower than the maximum possible clock speed for multiple reasons. At the same time, SSD makers set their NAND and controller up to the best possible clock speed and a fixed temperature for the highest possible endurance and performance. The rest depends on the components selection process and its quality. 

Gabriel answers the question and proves one thing: Anything with a clock speed can be overclocked with the right tools and knowledge.

Taiwan-based Elmor Labs made an unofficial successor for the Asus ROG Overclocking Panel, giving extreme overclockers an updated and cleaner easier-to-access panel in a single device. This OC panel allows basic controls and certain tweaks such as adjusting voltage, monitoring temperatures, and easy access to power, force reset, booting to safe mode, and other options such as Slow Mode. It's a handy little tool to do BIOS level tweaks on the fly. This effectively continues Asus' legacy, as it seems to have discontinued its own OC Panel that connected to its in-house OC header — a header that's still provided on certain extreme overclocking specialist motherboards. 

Origins of the Asus OC Panel

Asus had its ROG OC panel for motherboards like the Intel X99-based Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme, Intel Z87-based Maximus VI Impact/ Hero/ Gene, Intel X79-based Rampage IV Black Edition and the Z97-based Maximus VII Ranger/ Impract/ Hero/ Gene/ Formula range of motherboards. The last firmware update for the ROG OC panel was in June 2016. This used Asus ROG's in-house developed OC header, which gave this device the ability to monitor and tweak minor changes on the fly. It also included a 5.25" bay display.

It became outdated as 5.25" bays are no longer available on most modern cases. Asus still provides the same header on extreme overclocking specialist ROG motherboards, but the ROG OC panel hasn't seen further updates and there's no newer version for extreme overclocking enthusiasts. Granted, this represents a micro-niche with a handful of veterans globally whose contributions are regularly implemented for motherboard and graphics card development.

Still, Elmor Labs has stepped in to fill the gap with this all-in-one device for tweaking, controlling, and real-time monitoring purposes using the Asus header.

ASUS ROG Z790 Maximus Apex Encore is one recent motherboard with an OCP header that was used to showcase the function of this product during its prototype stage. Elmor Labs used their OC panel prototype to tweak their overclocks on the fly while balancing liquid nitrogen flow so as to not trigger the infamous Intel's 'Cold Boot' bug. It recorded a CPU-Z validation using the Intel Core-i9 14900KF overclocked to 9.043 GHz in October.

Fast forward to December, and we now have a retail product. There are no ROG aesthetics, yet it has all the functions, headers, and diagnostics enthusiasts could need in such a device. While this tool won't make you an expert overclocker at the drop of a fan, it's a convenient device for fine tweaking and real-time monitoring.

Elmor Labs has made many specialist products for the DIY extreme overclocking enthusiast space, but this tool picks up where Asus left off. The pricing of the Elmor Labs OC Panel is yet to be disclosed at the time of writing.

Of course, credit partially goes to the Asus ROG team as this tool wouldn't have been possible had the OCP header been discontinued in the post-Z97 chipset days. It would be even better if an open-source standard could be developed and updated that involved more brands, overclockers, and enthusiasts, but you know what they say about standards.

Overclocking expert Der8auer has provided some guidance on how to achieve 1000 frames per second (fps) in Counter-Strike 2. He used a potent mix of one of the best CPUs and probably the most powerful consumer gaming GPU to achieve his lofty goal – as well as several liters of liquid nitrogen. However, it is important to note that he set himself some strict guidelines: the game must run at 1080p, no less, and CS2’s graphics settings must be realistic for a pro eSports gamer.

Counter-Strike 2 is a game that is very well known for benefiting from the fastest frame rates. However, we aren’t at the stage where 1000 fps with realistic pro eSports settings is required (or possible) in a competitive tournament… Der8auer conducted some research to find what kinds of settings eSports pros used in this game. While many graphics quality settings can indeed be pared back, he noted some finer points. For example, using high settings for shadows seemed to be one of the favored choices among CS2 devotees. Thus, Der8auer admitted that his fps figures could in theory be higher, but they would then be using unrealistic settings for pro CS2 gamers.

The PC components that were used for this 1000 fps CS2 gaming session were as follows:

• Intel Core i9-14900K – retail sample, claimed to be ‘average’
• Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard – which has an LN2 mode in the BIOS
• LN2 coolant pot
• 2 liters of liquid nitrogen
• Elmore OC panel monitor
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card

To provide a performance baseline, Der8auer first ran the above system with an AIO liquid cooler and disabled e-cores, achieving 6 GHz. CS2 ran at up to about 800 fps using this overclocking setting.

Now the LN2 overclocking tests could begin. With temperatures down to -150 degrees Celsius, Der8auer found his 14900K processor could run at a stable 7.4 GHz (P-cores only). So, CS2 was fired up (with OBS screen recorder software) and the performance result was considerably better. The LN2 OC system achieved 1080p eSports settings CS2 gaming performance of about 950 fps on average.

Somewhat disappointed with his 14900K sample, the overclocking expert borrowed a better-binned chip that was available at the Asus OC lab. We then saw Der8auer progress, with some help from overclocker Safedisk, to 7.5 GHz, with various other refinements to memory timings. Subsequently, he achieved his goal, with CS2 performance remaining consistently above 1000 fps.

Pushing to 7.8 GHz, no real noticeable fps increase was observed, so it was thought that the mighty GPU had become the limiting factor. He didn’t want to lower graphics settings for more fps, as that would defeat the point of the video. Remember, he wanted realistic competitive eSports 1080p settings and 1000 fps or better.

Some further OC exploration with the binned 14900K CPU was surprisingly held back due to the system’s PCIe Gen5 SSD overheating. A sample with no heatsink had been installed, but after pointing a cutesy hand fan the SSD system stability returned and Der8auer managed to achieve a stable all-core 8.1 GHz overclock (see gallery above).

Der8auer recalls that as he was working on his 14900K overclocking and CS2 gaming video in Taiwan, he wasn’t alone. Also in attendance, in the Asus OC labs, were the aforementioned Safedisk, Elmor, Shamino, and Massman. This heavyweight team was pushing another 14900K to the max, this time using liquid helium. They tortured their sample at nearly -250 degrees Celsius and reached beyond 9 GHz on a single P-core. Der8auer didn’t think it was unrealistic to see an OC (of the same chip) over 10 GHz in the future.

In October we reported upon a Core i9-14900K setting a new record in CS2 with an incredible 1310 fps. This was achieved with the processor running between 7.5 GHz and 8 GHz on Gigabyte's Z790 Aorus Tachyon X motherboard. We aren’t sure what graphics / quality settings were used during that attempt.

Welcome back to the fun factory, aka, my basement computer lab — the realm where the exceptional becomes the standard. Today's journey will explore the extreme side of overclocking, focused mainly on the PC's brain, the processor. I recently nailed a total of 50 world records with Intel’s 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs. Many of those still stand as of this writing (people are always posting new ones to HWBot), including 15 world records with the Core i7-14700K and eight records with the Core i5-14600K, along with four records with the Core i9-14900K, spanning benchmarks from Cinebench to wPrime and H265. 

My top speeds were 7,730.11 MHz on all cores on the 14900K, 7,859.05 MHz on the 14600K and 7,600 MHz on the 14700K. All of these achieved in Cinebench R23 while using Liquid Nitrogen cooling.

The hero of the day? Intel's new baby is the Raptor Lake Refresh processors, led by the Core i9-14900K. The current newest flagship for the mainstream (will we get KS, maybe?) is clocked high out of the box, so what have they left for us to find on our own? Is this processor, as the kids say, a “smooth brain” or a “wrinkle brain?” Let’s find out.

“OC is dead!” some cry. Well, yes and no. Intel is pushing the turbo hard on these processors, which works great. Pushing upwards of 6 GHz was a dream not even a year ago, and it is seemingly the new standard. “But that's not on all cores.” Well, even I “cheat” the limits of the system by running an asynchronous per-core clock ratio on LN2. Why limit yourself to your weakest core? 

I think OC is changing. Depending on your motherboard and how they set up power and temperature limits, you can see a solid performance uplift from strapping on better cooling and changing nothing at all! You don't even have to go into the BIOS, but there is a feature in most BIOS now called Intel Current Limits. Many manufacturers have this disabled, even at stock settings. So, if you aren't following the Intel current limits, is your motherboard “overclocking” for you? If OC is dead, why is this even an option? Maybe you are an overclocker, and you don't even know it!

Let’s overclock! For full transparency, I have many close relations in the PC industry, and several sources provided these CPUs. They should be considered higher quality than a normal random draw. That being said, six out of six ran Cinebench R23 at 5.9 GHz on water cooling with all cores synced, and five out of six ran Cinebench R23 at 6.0 GHz on water cooling with all cores synced. Yes, 6 GHz! 

The 14900K is seemingly just a better 13900K, right? At the same MSRP, is that a win? If you are offered a better car for the same price a year later, is that a good deal? Is this especially true in the 2020s era /covid/greed/inflation? 

So, with fully manually controlled settings with no turbo and a fixed clock rate, the 14900K is the same as the 13900K as far as performance is concerned. Great. In this case, that means to break records, we will need pure clock speed enhancements. Maybe we will see a 7.19424% increase in clocks (13900K percent gain to 14900K)? 

For my record-setting attempts, I use my trusty ASRock Z690 Aqua OC motherboard. It’s a two-DIMM board for better memory overclocking, which helps the benchmarks we commonly run score higher than with a four-DIMM board. It’s about a little over a year old and still runs strong. Why not a Z790 motherboard if I have access to whatever I want? Well, to me, Z790 is just a different name for the same thing, much like the 13900K is to the 14900K.

The ENERMAX Revolution D.F. X 1050W ARGB powers the system. It’s 80-plus Gold, it’s tiny, and the cables are super bendy so that I can keep them out of the way of all my fans and LN2 containers easily. It handles the system on LN2 with no sweat.

For memory, I always choose G.SKILL. These are their DDR5 Trident Z5 7800 MHz RGB sticks in Silver. When pushing the limits, you need any edge you can get. A little lower latency or extra bandwidth can take you from silver to gold. That's why I use G.SKILL and their higher frequency kits. Love it or hate it, the RGB looks great and adds 100 points to my Cinebench scores (just kidding).

With my star-studded branded powerhouse of a system slapped together, we can finally work up an overclock. Cinebench R20, although aging now, seems to be the industry standard for OC measurement, so I usually start there. It’s also a fairly long, consistently high-load test. It really tests your cooling equipment, like the CPU LN2 container and thermal paste. I'm using Der8auer’s Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste currently and a Reaktor CPU container.

These CPUs don't like very high voltage: It generates too much heat and creates a downward spiral of high wattage, high temps, and general inefficiency. We want to run as cool as possible with as little voltage as possible, with clocks as high as possible for strong scoring and efficiency. For perspective, the max voltage I consider using with normal cooling (AIO, etc.) is around 1.4-1.45V. This would get you into the 100C area, and possibly thermal throttling at the very high end. 

On LN2, I’m only using +200mV more than that. Many think these are throw-away CPUs and garbage after being used on LN2, but that is far from the truth – the CPU will last countless sessions in these conditions. It is actually rare for me to kill or wound hardware, and when I do, I take it as a personal failure. I have a small graveyard in my backyard where I do a short service to pay my respects to fallen hardware heroes.

Here are some extra little tidbits for you: When the CPU pot is full, the temperature probe reads -192C. When I start the benchmark, it will reach as high as -189C, fighting against the cold face of the CPU pot filled with liquid nitrogen. The actual die temperature will be much higher than that. 

Frozen thermal paste is not the best conductor, and some strong forces work against each other in that weak layer. Sometimes, the cold will overwhelm the thermal paste, and it will either crack or separate itself from one side of what it is supposed to be cooling. In that case, it will become more of an insulator than a conductor, and nothing will run. 

The CPU will reach a positive temperature even though the metal container millimeters away from it is an insane -190C. When this happens, you have to tear everything apart and start over. It’s a mess, and a total timesuck. Luckily, this only happened once during my benching session, and it was my fault. 

At the end of a week of playing around, I broke the 8-core Cinebench record at a crazy 7.73 GHz on all cores! In total, I managed over 50 records between the i5, i7, and i9 processors that were refreshed. They are a breeze to overclock and really fun to work with. Overall, these CPUs potentially OC better than their predecessors and cost the same. It was a rather refreshing refresh, I would say. 

Disclosure: ASRock, Enermax, Intel, G.Skill, and Thermal Grizzly contribute to my overclocking success.

What do you get when you have a Core i9-14900K, one of the best CPUs, and an endless flow of liquid nitrogen (LN2? A lot of world records, of course. Team Australia Extreme Overclocking (Team.AU) and Intel have set some exciting records at SXSW Sydney 2023.

During a live demonstration, Team.AU pushed the Core i9-14900K between 7.5 GHz and 8 GHz on Gigabyte's Z790 Aorus Tachyon X motherboard. Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager, Enthusiast PC and Workstation
, Client Computing Group, energetically fed the Core i9-14900K with LN2 to keep it cool. The Core i9-14900K has a maximum boost clock of 6 GHz; therefore, Team.AU's feat represents a 33% overclock. It's a significant overclock, but it's still leagues below the current world record of 9,043.92 MHz set by the Core i9-14900KF.

While Team.AU's Core i9-14900K is not even close to catching the world record holder, it set a performance record in Counter-Strike 2. The overclocked Core i9-14900K was pumping out frame rates up to a staggering 1,310 FPS. It wasn't just a static scene, either. The Core i9-14900K was game-stable as a guest from the crowd was enjoying a round of Counter-Strike 2 and racking up several kills. Currently, there aren't any commercial gaming monitors that can handle that type of frame rate. Asus' ROG Swift Pro PG248QP, which has a 540 Hz refresh rate, suddenly doesn't feel so fast anymore.

The Core i9-14900K pushing frame rates over 1,300 FPS on Counter-Strike 2 wasn't the only highlight at SXSW Sydney 2023. Team.AU also broke the DDR5 world record, aggressively driving Gigabyte's DDR5-8333 16GB memory module to DDR5-11618. Unlike the Counter-Strike 2 record, the system was at borderline stability as the overclockers received a BSOD shortly after hitting the frequency. Fortune was smiling on them as they had just enough time to submit the result to HWbot, and now we have a new DDR5 overclocking world record.

Intel's 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors are available worldwide at your favorite retailer. As usual, the Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i5-14600K lead the pack, with the non-K series part arriving shortly after. The refreshed chips are marginally faster than the regular Raptor Lake counterparts but retain the exact pricing.

The overclocking team from Asus has achieved a new CPU frequency world record with Intel's brand-new Raptor Lake Refresh Core i9-14900KF. The team was able to achieve a very impressive 9043.92GHz on a single P-core with liquid helium, breaking the previous world record by 35.1MHz.

The overclocking rig used to hit this new world record included Intel's brand-new Core i9-14900KF flagship CPU (no integrated graphics), 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z memory, an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard, and a 1200W Enermax PSU. For cooling, the team used liquid helium (rarer, colder, and more expensive than liquid nitrogen) to reach a minimum thermal threshold of negative 235C–240C. According to SkatterBencher, one of Asus' team members, it took the team a whole week to break the (now previous) CPU world record.

35MHz might not sound like a big margin (and it isn't), but in the land of CPU frequency records, any minute gains are huge. The previous world record was held by the same Asus overclocking team, using Intel's previous-generation Core i9-13900KF to hit 9.008 GHz back in December of 2022.

Naturally, the Asus team is not done yet with Intel's latest 14900KF CPU. After scoring their world-record result, the team pushed on and managed to briefly hit 9.1GHz before locking up. Sadly, the system was too unstable to validate the score, making it an unsuccessful 9.1GHz attempt. Nonetheless, their 9.1GHz screenshot shows there may be more in the tank for Raptor Lake Refresh's enhanced overclocking capabilities — we could see another new world record in the not-too-distant future.

Intel's i9-14900KF is the company's latest flagship CPU, sporting a lightly refreshed flavor of Intel's Raptor Lake CPU architecture. One of the tweaks Intel made for its latest refresh is the inclusion of a revised Intel 7 process node that improves the chip's base/boost frequencies and improves the chip's overclocking potential. The enhancements appear to have paid off, allowing SkatterBencher and his team to (re-)secure a world-record result with the new chip.

It's an exciting time for fans of this very niche CPU overclocking sport. This latest 14900KF result represents the third broken world record in under a year, all with Intel's 13th and 14th Gen chips. Before Intel's Raptor Lake chips stole the show, AMD was on top with a world record result of 8.722 GHz on the old Piledrive FX 8350, a record that had remained unbroken for eight years.

Intel's engineers have managed to push boost CPU core clocks of the upcoming Meteor Lake processors beyond 5.0 GHz, according to renowned hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade Pack (via HXL). The purportedly improved frequency potential of Intel's next-generation CPU cores would allow Intel's Meteor Lake products to offer significantly higher performance than the company's existing offerings. 

According to the leak, Intel's 14th-Gen Core Ultra 7 processor now reaches a single-core boost clock of 5.0 GHz, whereas the Core Ultra 9 goes past 5.0 GHz. As with all leaks, this should be taken with a grain of salt as the information is unofficial, and it is unclear whether these frequencies can be achieved on mass-produced silicon. 

Intel's contemporary 13th-Gen Core 'Raptor Lake' processors for high-end notebooks boost their high-performance cores to 5.0 GHz and beyond without problems. Meanwhile, boosting the CPU cores of Meteor Lake may be a bit more challenging.  

On the one hand, the general-purpose CPU cores of Meteor Lake are housed inside a revolutionary 3D-stacked compute tile and are made on Intel 4 process technology that uses extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The new production node promises to offer numerous advantages over Intel 7 node (previously known as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin). But on the other hand, the previous-gen fabrication technology was designed to enable datacenter-oriented CPUs with comparatively lower boost clocks, so Intel 4 may not be as 'fast' as its predecessor. 

Another thing about boosting the frequency of Meteor Lake's compute tile is that it may get too hot or too power hungry at some point. Meanwhile, being a multi-tile 3D-stacked design, Meteor Lake may, by definition, be more power hungry than a similar product featuring a monolithic die. Hence, the CPU's power consumption must be kept in check.

Alleged Specifications of Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs for Laptops

Since Intel's mobile 14th Generation Core Ultra-badged 'Meteor Lake' processors are not going to have a core count advantage over existing 13th Generation Core 'Raptor Lake' CPUs (both have up to six high-performance cores and up to eight energy-efficient cores), it may be imperative for them to have high clocks to clearly outperform predecessors in all workloads.

Of course, the new processors are set to feature some new accelerators and features that will likely improve the user experience in general, and AI workloads in particular. However, many people will still want to compare CPUs in things like games and professional performance-hungry applications, and these tend to rely on good-old CPU cores, so the higher the frequency, the better.

However, since the information about CPU boost clocks of Intel's Meteor Lake does not come from Intel and we have no idea how fresh or outdated it is, we should take it with discretion.

HardwareLuxx editor Andreas Schilling shared a few new details that AMD provided him about its new and highly-capable AGESA 1.0.0.7b microcode update. AMD confirmed that the update features enhancements to three very important mechanisms that improve memory stability and enable Ryzen 7000 series CPUs to run DDR5 memory frequencies beyond DDR5-8000.

The three new features include memory training adjustments and extended adjustments to the tWR memory timing, which is where the extended DDR5 frequency range comes from.

Additionally, the tWR timing in AGESA 1.0.0.7b has been expanded, allowing looser timings. Apparently, the tWR was limited before 1.0.0.7b came out, preventing looser timings, which handicapped the memory frequency range on the AM5 platform.

AMD also revealed that there are two memory training updates that come in AGESA 1.0.0.7b. The first is txDFE / Enhanced Memory Training which is a new BIOS option users can manually enable to gain better memory stability or margin on many memory kits. The only side-effect of this feature is that it takes longer to train, meaning that boot-up times will take longer.

The second is a new feature called Fast Memory Training, that does the exact opposite of the first. It decreases the amount of time memory needs to be trained on an AM5 motherboard to speed up the boot process. This feature is supposed to work well for non-OC memory kits, but can also be used with XMP/EXPO kits in many circumstances.

All of these features improve the stability of DDR5 memory on AM5 motherboards and CPUs and significantly improve the amount of frequency headroom Ryzen 7000 CPUs can run on the memory. This is why we have seen so several overclockers achieve DDR5-8000 ~ DDR5-9000 DDR5 overclocking results over the past month, thanks to these new enhancements baked into the AGESA 1.0.0.7b update.

The only problem with this additional frequency headroom is that it does little to nothing to improve gaming performance. Some testing has found that running at DDR5-7400 memory provided 1% worse performance than DDR5-6200. This is due to Ryzen's infamous infinity fabric limitations that prevent the interconnect from running high memory frequencies. On Ryzen 7000, to run DDR5 memory beyond 6000-6400, the memory subsystem needs to run the FCLK, UCLK, and MCLK at a 1:1:2 ratio (instead of 1:1:1) which increases memory latency.

As a result, gaming performance will always take a hit as long as the MCLK needs to run in a higher latency mode. For workstation users/power users, this won't be as problematic since there are programs that take advantage of the additional DDR5 memory bandwidth afforded by DDR5-7000~9000 kits, but it's not the norm.

Just days after AMD released its new memory-enhancing AGESA 1.0.0.7b update, HiCookie, one of the world's best-known overclockers, has managed to hit over 9000 MHz on one of his DDR5 memory kits operating on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D system. 

This is one of the fastest DDR5 overclocks we've seen to date on any DDR5-supported platform, demonstrating that AM5 has a lot more DDR5 overclocking potential than initially expected. At this rate, we could see 10,000 MHz overclocks in no time — and we might even see Ryzen 7000 systems actively beating Intel's best Alder Lake/Raptor Lake CPUs in memory overclocking for the first time ever.

The overclock was achieved with Gigabyte DDR5-8400 modules on a B650E Aorus Tacyon motherboard with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU. The DDR5 modules were overclocked to 9058 MHz with slightly tighter 54-56-56-126 timings compared to the module's default XMP configuration.

The new AGESA 1.0.0.7b update is arguably the most impactful AMD microcode update we've seen on the AM5 platform to date. The new patch substantially increases memory support (and memory stability, by the looks of it), allowing most Ryzen 7000 CPUs to hit 7000 - 8000 MHz regularly and 6400 MHz in a 1:1 UCLK:MEMCLK ratio, which is optimal for gaming and other latency-sensitive tasks. This is a substantial change from previous patches, where 6000 MHz was the peak most Ryzen 7000 chips could hit stably. Anything beyond 6000 MHz was completely unpredictable.

The new update has a lot of new features that enhance memory stability and boost frequency support, but the primary change that improves higher-frequency DDR5 functionality is a new set of previously-hidden timing parameters that control the Ryzen 7000 memory controller. These settings were hidden from the user in the past — and possibly motherboard manufacturers as well — but now they have opened them up to users and BIOS developers to alleviate any bottlenecks the memory controller might be responsible for.

If overclockers continue to push memory overclocks like this with AMD's new AGESA microcode update, this may be the first real competition we've seen from AMD regarding memory overclocking. Past AMD Ryzen architectures have always had inferior memory overclocking performance, due to the hardware limitations of their memory controllers, compared to Intel. But now it seems like the tables may be turning, and AMD may even have the better-performing memory controller. We'll know this soon enough if memory overclockers start breaking DDR5 frequency world records on AMD hardware.

Intel recently made its Raptor Lake Refresh chips official, and indications point to a mid-October release for the first unlocked "K" processors. However, we shouldn't get too excited about leaks indicating that out of the box boost clocks of 6.2 GHz might be available. Today, Benchlife sources poured cold water on >6.0 GHz rumors, saying that the flagship Intel Core i9-14900K "may reach 6.0 GHz," at best. Notably, a 6.0 GHz boost clock for this CPU would only match the previous (current) gen Core i9-13900KS.

The initial batch of Intel 14th Gen Core 'Raptor Lake Refresh' chips for desktops will be a trio of unlocked CPUs: the Intel Core i5-14600K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i9-14900K (KF processors too). We expect Intel to differentiate the refreshed parts in a number of ways. Some chips might get an uplift in efficiency core (E-core) count, the amount of Smart Cache available, and / or clock speeds, but intergenerational changes will vary by SKU.

Let's draw up a table charting the previous (current gen) Core i9-13900K against its purported successor's specs:

Assuming the Benchlife sources are correct, buyers of the Refresh will get very slim pickings compared to the previous gen. The upgrade might be enough for Intel's gaming CPU marketing department to make a meal of, though. All we see changing in the above table are incremental clock speed uplifts for the P+E cores, and nothing in terms to extra E-cores or caches. We guess upgraders are hoping for the rumored improved integrated memory controller (IMC) and other behind the scenes improvements. Yesterday we hinted at the paucity of Raptor Lake Refresh, which was easily overshadowed by the great things seen coming with Arrow Lake.

Hopefully, the Raptor Lake Refresh CPU lineup won't be entirely underwhelming. Among the initial trio of 'K' suffixed SKUs the Core i7 14700K appears to stand out, for example, by reportedly boasting a brand new configuration of 8P+12E (compared to current gen 8P+8E).

Meanwhile, for those dreaming of out of the box >6.0 GHz boost clock Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, they might have to wait for the inevitable performance binned Intel Core i9-14900KS launch.

Game Boy is one of the most iconic handheld gaming consoles of all time. Almost 35 years later, enthusiasts and gamers still find new mods and hacks for the retro device and its accompanying add-ons, such as the Super Game Boy.

The Super Game Boy is essentially a cartridge that bridges the gap between the Game Boy and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), allowing the latter to play cartridges from the handheld console. The Game Boy and Super NES are two different devices with little in common. As a result, the Super Game Boy leverages the same hardware as the Game Boy to emulate the latter's game on the Super NES.

The Game Boy features a custom Sharp LR35902 processor based on the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 chips. The 8-bit processor features a clock speed of 4.19 MHz. However, the Super Game Boy's clock speed is 4.295 MHz, resulting in the accessory running Game Boy games at a 2.4% faster pace. The audio is sped up, and there wasn't a link port on the Super Game Boy since the difference in clock speed would cause it and a normal Game Boy to desynchronize. It's why Nintendo exclusively launched the Super Game Boy 2 in Japan, an upgraded variant incorporating a custom crystal oscillator to mirror the Game Boy's clock speed alongside a link port for two-player gameplay.

As Nicole Express spotted, user nensondubois recently released a ROM hack for World Heroes 2 Jet to further overclock the Super Game Boy. The hack enables a "turbo mode" per se to run the device at 5.35 MHz. The website provided a few audio samples to show the overlock and a small video of the overclocked device. The biggest drawback is the graphical glitches, a product of the hardware limitation.

Obviously, Nintendo didn't want users to be fiddling with the Super Game Boy's turbo mode. According to Nicole Express, the code isn't available through the Super Game Boy BIOS on the Game Boy side. Instead, you can only access it through the Super NES end.

It's cool that the Game Boy scene is still alive after all these years, and we're still seeing new mods. Game Boy was part of many childhoods, so there's always a special place for the handheld gaming console in our hearts.

Extreme overclocker CENS has pushed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card to 4,090 MHz for "a fun one." If we look at the German overclocker's screenshots, we can see they actually achieved 4,095 MHz, but we appreciate their eye for symmetry, and a headline.

CENS' liquid nitrogen fuelled overclocking feat certainly proves that timing is everything, as last week we covered the momentous occasion of the first Nvidia AD102 GPU to edge past the 4,000 MHz milestone. CENS and Splave had been earnestly jockeying for that crown through June and early July, but Splave managed to grab the glory last week.

While the official HWBot charts have a max CPU speed, max memory speed, and even a max motherboard speed category, there is no such general GPU frequency chart. Recently RTX 4090 GPU overclockers have run a benchmark, commonly GPUPi v3,3 32B, to register their GPU frequencies on the HWBot database. However, for some reason, possibly due to stability, CENS didn't even run GPUPi - so Splave retains that particular world record.

For the GeForce RTX 4090 pushed to 4090 MHz, all CENS shows is a GPU-Z screenshot, and a picture of his LN2 cooled system. In the GPU-Z info screens we can see that the 4,095 MHz was achieved while the GPU was cooled to about minus 35 degrees Celsius. We don't know exactly what the hardware used was this time around, but it is likely to be the same setup CENS used for previous 4 GHz GPU clock milestone attempts. Central to that setup was the Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 iGame LAB graphics card. CENS' wallpaper still has this graphics card logo on it. In his extreme RTX 4090 overclocking adventures, Splave seemed to prefer the Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090.

It is likely that CENS' other system components remained the same, namely an Intel Core i9 13900K, an EVGA DARK Kingpin Z690 motherboard, and specialist extreme cooling paraphernalia from KingPin and Elmor Labs.

More Just-for-Fun World Records, Please

The world's fastest verified CPU frequency according to HWBot is 9,009 MHz on an Intel Core i9 13900K (8P). Sadly, a just-for-fun world record where this CPU is pushed to 13,900 MHz seems to be way out of reach. The venerable AMD FX-8370 has been pushed well beyond its 'fun' stage, achieving 8,723 MHz to be second placed in the CPU frequency rankings.

Do you want to know how to overclock your CPU? If so, this guide is for you, with all of the necessary details on how to overclock your Intel or AMD CPU.

Contrary to innumerable reports of its demise, overclocking is not dead — not by a long shot. Yes, overclocking headroom has receded as the Intel vs AMD rivalry has intensified and the chipmakers focus on squeezing out every ounce of performance, particularly in the highest-end flagship processors. However, Intel's Alder and Raptor Lake chips represent a return of generous overclocking headroom, helping the chips take key spots on our list of best CPUs for gaming.

AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 chips don't have as much headroom for manual overclocking — the company's automated overclocking features are best for tuning —, but like Intel, AMD exposes a wealth of other tuning options that can give you a nice bump in performance. The company has also added even more overclocking support for its new Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D chips, too. 

Should you overclock a CPU, and how do you overclock a CPU? Well, there are a set of best practices that you should follow when you overclock your processor, and if you take a reasonable approach, the risk is minimal. Today, we'll show you how to overclock your CPU and teach you how to unlock the hidden performance lurking under your heatspreader. We also have CPU overclocking benchmarks showing the performance increases we achieved with relatively easy techniques. Here's our guide that shows the steps you take to overclock your CPU.  

We'll provide the deep-dive details for each step further below, but here is the basic step-by-step process of overclocking if you're just looking for general advice:

1. Determine if your CPU and motherboard support overclocking and if your cooler and power supply are sufficient.
2. Run CPU stress tests and record baseline performance benchmarks.
3. Enter the BIOS or open the software overclocking utility
4. Set the CPU multiplier/frequency to your desired overclock
5. Adjust CPU Voltage (Vcore)
6. Reboot your system
7. Conduct stress tests
8. Wash, Rinse, Repeat

CPU Overclocking Checklist

Before we start turning up the dial on the voltages and fans, you'll need to make sure that your system is ready for overclocking. As always, we have to caution that overclocking voids the warranty on any processor, and you run the risk of damaging your chip if you apply excessive voltage. Overclocking also increases power consumption and heat, so you'll need to accept and accommodate those needs. Excessive voltage and heat can also result in reduced chip lifespan due to premature degradation if you don't stay within reasonable boundaries.

However, if you take the right precautions, the chance of damage to your chip is minimal. Modern chips have a plethora of in-built safety mechanisms that help reduce the risks associated with overclocking. If you take a common-sense and responsible approach, you can squeeze every single megahertz out of the processor without assuming unnecessary risks.
 
Do I own an overclockable CPU?

Naturally, you'll need an overclockable processor. AMD's generous overclocking policy means that you can overclock nearly any chip though the first-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D is an exception. AMD also has some restrictions for the other X3D chips, like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but there are at least some knobs exposed for tuning, including for the memory and fabric.

For Intel, you'll need a K-series chip if you plan on increasing the chips' core frequency, which is the most basic method of overclocking. That's because K-Series chips have an unlocked multiplier that allows you to easily dial up the frequency on your chip. As always, you'll be at the whims of the silicon lottery when it comes to the maximum overclock you can squeeze out of your chip — some chips simply overclock better than others, even when they are otherwise identical. 

Does my motherboard allow me to overclock?

AMD allows overclocking on any chipset except the A-series motherboards. For Intel, if you plan on doing full core frequency overclocking, you'll need a Z-series motherboard, as Intel doesn't allow you to change the chip's frequency on cheaper B- and H-series motherboards (you can only overclock the memory on lower-tier Intel motherboards). Most higher-end motherboards have robust power delivery subsystems but performance varies, so pay attention to motherboard reviews to find your best option. You can hit our list of Best Motherboards to see the best models on the market.

Can my CPU cooler keep my overclocked processor cool?

Keeping your CPU as cool as possible is one of the keys to attaining the highest CPU overclocks. Check out our Best CPU coolers article for recommended options, and be sure to use one of the Best Thermal Pastes to ensure your cooler is effective. Ensuring that your case has adequate ventilation is also key, so be sure to ensure that you have enough airflow. 

As a general rule of thumb, more is better for cooling; a CPU cooler that can handle 40% more TDP than your CPU's rating is preferred. However, having less cooling headroom won't prevent you from extracting any gains at all — the chip's peak temperatures will just limit how much you can overclock. The definition of sufficient cooling can vary based on your personal preference, but your overriding goal should be to prevent thermal throttling. We'll dive into that shortly. 

Overclocking all of the CPU cores at once ('all-core' overclocking) is the most common and easiest method of overclocking, but it does tend to generate the most heat. As a general rule, it's preferable to have a 240mm All-In-One (AIO) liquid cooler (or air cooler equivalent) for all-core overclocking with a modern Core i5 or Ryzen 5, and you'll want a more powerful 280mm AIO or better to wring out the most performance possible on the higher-end Core i7, i9, Ryzen 7 and 9 SKUs.

Overclocking cooling requirements can vary based on the generation of chip you're tuning, so be aware those guidelines don't apply to all previous-gen chips. More elegant overclocking approaches that don't use brute-force all-core overclocking methods, like manipulating turbo ratios or only overclocking a few cores, can also extract extra performance even if you're using a lesser cooler — you just have to pay close attention to your CPU temperature when you dial in the overclock. We'll also cover those methods below.

Does my power supply have sufficient headroom?

Listed here last, but certainly not least, you'll also need to ensure that you have one of the best power supplies for your system, but your requirements will vary based on the other components in your system. You can see the basic guidelines with a power supply calculator, but be sure to enter the maximum overclock frequency and voltage to ensure you have plenty of room for overclocking. Having plenty of power headroom, and clean power, is critical, so don't skimp on the power supply. However, you don't need to upgrade to the latest ATX 3.0 power supplies to do so. 

How to Overclock a CPU in BIOS or Windows

Overclocking requires changing several system settings, like voltages and clock speeds. You can do software overclocking inside Windows 10 and Windows 11 with utilities like Intel's XTU or AMD's Ryzen Master, or you can enter the values directly into the system BIOS/UEFI. It's pretty simple to enter the BIOS to overclock; on the majority of platforms, you simply reboot the system and click delete or F2 repeatedly as it restarts. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.

Software overclocking in Windows is a bit simpler because it uses standardized naming for the various settings, whereas motherboard makers often use different names for the same settings (luckily, the BIOS tends to have a short descriptor for each option). Additionally, overclocking in Windows allows you to make changes in real-time. In contrast, changing the values in the BIOS requires a system reboot before you see the impact. Overclocking your CPU in the BIOS does have one big advantage, though: There are far more fine-grained options available for more advanced tuners. Most die-hard overclockers stick with BIOS overclocking and use software tools for monitoring.

It is important to save your BIOS settings before you make changes. Overclocking your CPU is a trial-and-error process, so you might need to restore these settings several times. Most motherboards let you save your settings to a profile you can later restore, and you can assign simple names to keep track of multiple profiles. If you dial in good overclocked settings but would like to push even higher, it makes sense to save a profile so you can easily revert to a known-stable configuration if needed. 

While the names for certain settings can vary somewhat based on your motherboard vendor, the major manufacturers (Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI) all include a wealth of options to overclock your CPU with their enthusiast-class boards. You can go as deep as you want on a top-tier motherboard, but the basics aren't nearly as daunting as the wealth of options might suggest.

There are a plethora of settings and voltages you can manipulate for overclocking. For the scope of this article, we'll only focus on the basic settings that you'll need to get your overclock up and running. We'll refer to these basic settings in the following sections, but we have also provided a glossary of other key BIOS terms at the bottom of the article for your reference.

• CPU Ratio Multiplier - Dictates the ratio between the CPU and the BCLK. The formula to determine the processor's frequency consists of multiplying the base clock by the CPU multiplier. For example, a processor with a 100 MHz BCLK with a multiplier of 50 will operate at 5,000 MHz, or 5 GHz. 
• Base Clock (BCLK) - The frequency at which the processor communicates with the memory and PCIe devices. The default BCLK for Intel chips is 100 MHz, but you can adjust this for smaller incremental performance increases. Be aware that adjusting the base clock also impacts the PCIe and memory busses, so you should refrain from adjusting your BCLK until your overclock is stable. Even then, it would be best if you did so sparingly.  
• CPU Core Ratio - This lets you choose whether you want to set the multiplier for all the cores in a group, or individually. The latter is referred to as per-core overclocking, and it allows you to tune individual cores to their highest potential instead of the lowest common denominator. This approach can also allow you to squeeze at least some overclocking headroom out of systems with lesser coolers. 
• Vcore - This voltage goes by many names, like Core Voltage or vCore, but it always dictates the motherboard's main input voltage to the processor. This value has the most direct input on thermals, with higher amounts of voltage generating more heat. 

CPU Overclocking Stress Tests, Baseline Benchmarks

Overclocking your CPU is a balancing act that requires a few compromises, so you should establish baseline measurements of both performance and CPU thermals so you can see the impact. This baseline data helps you gauge the acceptable tradeoffs for the amount of performance you gain.

There are a plethora of software options for stress testing and monitoring — see our how to stress test your CPU guide for additional details. Some, like AIDA64 or OCCT, have in-built stress testing and monitoring, while others, like HWInfo, are purely designed to monitor performance. The chipmakers also provide their own software: Intel has Intel's eXtreme Tuning Utility (XTU) software, while AMD provides its Ryzen Master software. Both of these applications allow for monitoring and overclocking from within Windows 10 and Windows 11, but other functions, like stress testing, vary.

Stress tests are a good way to evaluate your overclock's stability because they fully stress the processor and generate a lot of heat. Some hardcore enthusiasts fry their chips for days at a time to ensure stability, while others do just a few hours of stress testing. It's up to you to decide how long you want to run the tests. Just don't fixate on them, and throw some daily use into the mix as well. Also, be sure to watch for signs of instability that are more subtle than an outright BSOD. For example, consider the system unstable if it hitches, stutters, or has momentary freezes.

Stress tests often merely serve as power viruses that will stress your system beyond what you would encounter in normal use, so it's best to use reasonable utilities and/or intense multi-threaded applications that you would find in normal PC use. We prefer AIDA64 and OCCT for quick synthetic stress testing, but employ the HandBrake and Blender applications for extended-duration testing. You can also use Prime95 or Intel Burn Test if you're interested in using the most intense tests available. 

Now that you're ready, kick off your stress test and let it run until temperatures stabilize, then log the final measurements. As we've outlined in our how to check your CPU temperature article, it's best to keep most chips below 80C during load and under 30C at idle to minimize long-term wear on the processor. However, AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors are designed to run at up to 95C with a stock cooler, while Intel's highest-end Core i9 Alder Lake processors can run up to 100C during normal operation. So you'll need to check the chip specs to find the correct threshold.

Passing Prime95 doesn't necessarily mean your processor is stable for other workloads, either. Remember, you can only prove instability, not stability. This means that regardless of the length of time that you stress test your processor and pass, you can still encounter a random BSOD. As such, don't overclock mission-critical systems. You can reference our How to Stress-Test CPUs and PCs (Like We Do) article for more detail. Now that you're ready, kick off your stress test and let it run until temperatures stabilize, then log the final measurements.

Next, you want to set a performance baseline. The most general benchmarking rule is that the best performance benchmark is to simply measure the performance of the programs you use the most. However, those often don't have built-in benchmarks. In that case, you can also use similar types of programs (renderers or encoders, for instance) as a proxy for your workload.

Synthetic gaming benchmarks don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but given their stability and repeatability, these are great benchmarks for comparing performance before and after any changes you may make to your system. Be sure to turn off as many background tasks as possible during your benchmarks to eliminate that influence from your CPU benchmark results.

You can get away with just CineBench, but the more the merrier. Run your tests and log the results. You'll use this information to compare to later after you've overclocked the processor. Here are a few common benchmarks, but you can see a more expansive list in our CPU Benchmark article:

• Cinebench R23 (MS Store) — This rendering CPU benchmark program has both single- and multi-core benchmark modes. This is one of the most commonly-used CPU benchmarks. 
• UL Benchmarks 3DMark — This synthetic CPU benchmark has a plethora of built-in tests for both CPUs and GPUs and is updated regularly with new tests. This is the go-to synthetic gaming test for many. 
• CPU-Z — This is a common utility that exposes the details of your processor, but it also has a built-in CPU benchmark that is incredibly simple to run. CPU-Z test results are also widely shared among enthusiasts, so it's easy to find comparison systems. 

How to Overclock a CPU

Here are the basic steps of overclocking your chip, but be aware that this is a trial-and-error process, so you'll need to be patient and reboot your PC multiple times as you dial in the perfect settings. We suggest overclocking your memory after you have dialed in your peak CPU overclock.

We also recommend changing the fewest number of variables as possible between each reboot and series of stress tests. Ideally, you would change one variable per attempt to ensure that you can determine the impact of each change correctly. We have other sections below with more specific advice for overclocking Intel and AMD CPUs, but these basic steps apply to both chipmakers:

Step 1.) Enter the BIOS or open the software overclocking utility: Our tutorial on accessing the BIOS explains how, but for most desktop PCs, hitting the Del of F2 key on your keyboard as soon as you see the motherboard logo pop up on your monitor works. You can also use a software-based overclocking utility, like Intel's XTU or AMD's Ryzen Master, to adjust many of the same parameters.

Be sure to set your fan speed/fan profiles to more aggressive settings to ensure strong cooling for your system. The strength of your cooler will largely dictate how fast you need to turn up your fans but be aware that you will have to live with the increased noise level, so set a reasonable limit. You should only dial in your overclock with the fan settings you are willing to accept long-tem: Do not turn your fans down after you have dialed the overclock, as this will lead to overheating.

Step 2.) Set the CPU multiplier to your desired overclock: This setting assigns the frequency the chip runs at. The formula to determine the processor's frequency consists of multiplying the base clock (BCLK) by the CPU multiplier. For example, a processor with a 100 MHz BCLK with a multiplier of 50 will operate at 5,000 MHz, or 5 GHz. 

You can choose to apply an 'all-core' overclock, meaning that all cores will operate at the same frequency, or on newer processors, assign different frequencies for individual cores. You can also overclock via the 'Turbo Ratio,' which allows the CPU to boost to different overclocked frequencies based on the number of active cores.

There are two approaches to this step: You can gradually increase your processor's frequency using 100 MHz increments until you've hit the wall, or you can set the desired frequency and work your way up or down from there.

Step 3.) Adjust CPU Voltage (Vcore): This parameter dictates the motherboard's main input voltage to the processor. This value has the most direct input on thermals, with higher amounts of voltage generating more heat. We suggest starting with a low Vcore (1.25V or lower) as the starting point and then working your way up if your system isn't stable at your desired frequency.

Maximum voltage thresholds vary based on the generation of the processor you're overclocking. However, a general rule of thumb is not to exceed 1.40V for 9th-Gen and newer processors unless you're using exotic (sub-ambient) cooling. Higher voltages will result in faster chip degradation.

There is no magic formula when it comes to overclocking. If you want to pinpoint the exact voltage for stability, use small increments of 0.01V. If you're not the patient type, you can work with higher increments, like 0.05V.

Be aware that temperatures will rise, and frequency improvements will decline, on a non-linear basis with voltage increases. That means you'll get less of a frequency gain in exchange for more heat as you work your way up to higher voltages. We suggest not using the borderline voltage for stability. Overclocking isn't a precise science, and hardware is unpredictable— leave yourself some margin.

Step 4.) Reboot your system: If you are in the BIOS, save your changes and exit, which will trigger a system reboot. If you are using a software overclocking utility, save your changes and reboot the system normally. If the system doesn't start, proceed to Step 6.

Step 5.) Conduct stress tests: Run a few of the stress tests we listed in the previous section, carefully logging temperatures and performance as you go. If your system completes those tests and remains stable within a reasonable temperature range, you can either choose to stay at your new overclocked settings or you can proceed to the next step.

Step 6.) Wash, Rinse, Repeat: If your system doesn't boot, or if it is stuttery, hitches, blue screens (BSOD), crashes, or generally acts unstable, reboot the system and adjust your settings in the BIOS or software as necessary to attempt to address the issue. Essentially, you repeat the steps above and make changes to find stable settings. For instance, you can slowly increase the CPU voltage (Vcore) to attempt to stabilize your chosen CPU overclock frequency. Conversely, you could reduce the CPU frequency without changing the voltage.

If your system is stable through your stress tests, you can repeat the steps above to push to higher overclocked CPU frequencies. Overclocking is a delicate balancing act of frequency and voltage, and temperature largely dictates the limits. Proceed with care. Once you have dialed in your desired frequency limit, it is always advisable to try a few rounds of rebooting and reducing the core voltage slightly to find the lowest possible voltage you can use, which will ultimately result in a cooler chip that lives longer.

Optional Step.) For Intel processors only, set the AVX offset to -1 or -2 to reduce the multiplier when your processor engages in AVX workloads: AVX workloads hit the processor hard and, as a result, require more voltage to achieve stability. That makes the chip run hotter, and be less stable. It isn't uncommon to see high overclocks accompanied by -3 or -4 AVX offsets. This will help you attain higher overclocks overall, so it is highly advisable to specify an AVX offset.

Optional Step.) Configure the voltage mode to the selection of your choice: We suggest using a static (override) voltage mode until you've dialed in your overclock. After that, you can try other modes. Adaptive mode is often popular because the Vcore decreases with the multiplier, which will make the processor generate less heat and consume less power.

Optional Step.) Set the Load Line Calibration: Load Line Calibration (LLC) compensates for Vdroop by assuring that voltages remain at a more even level, thus solidifying your overclock. Some motherboard brands prefer to use numeric values to denote the LLC level, while others use non-numeric values. For the average user, a medium value should be more than enough. You can experiment with the different values to see which works best for you, though. Newer-generation motherboards, particularly higher-end models, tend to adjust this setting automatically with precision. Unless you're chasing the highest of overclocks, you can often leave this setting unaltered and stick with the "Auto" setting.

Intel P-Cores and E-Cores CPU Overclocking

Alder Lake has P-cores for latency-sensitive work that tends to be lightly threaded, while the E-cores step in for multi-threaded work and background tasks. The E-cores can only be overclocked in groups of four, while P-Cores can be overclocked individually or in groups. Alder Lake provides plenty of options for fine-tuning — you can disable the E-cores entirely, which often allows you to eke out a slightly higher overclock (typically a single bin) on the P-Cores.

Choosing whether to disable the E-cores will depend on your own personal preference, but leaving both the P-cores and E-cores active will offer the best blend of overclocking performance for most users in both Windows 10 and Windows 11. However, this means that you'll have to overclock them separately. Head over to our How to Overclock Alder Lake CPUs guide for more detailed instructions. 

All-Core, Per-Core and Turbo Ratio CPU Overclocking

You can overclock the CPU frequency in three ways: All core, Per core, and via Turbo Ratios, with the last option only available on Intel processors. The 'all core' setting is what we traditionally associate with overclocking. 'All core' is the simplest method by far because it assigns one static frequency to all cores at once. 'Simplest' doesn't always translate to 'best,' though.

Overclocking via the Turbo Ratios is one of the best ways to dial in a refined overclock, as this allows you to define the peak boost frequency based on how many cores are active. This feature can help you eke out a slightly higher overclock by targeting more robust cores with higher frequencies, but just as importantly, it allows the processor to drop back into its base frequency when the chip isn't under load. This allows the chip to run cool when it isn't busy and also reduces the amount of time the chip is at the highest frequencies, which is important for chip longevity (more on that below). 

If you overclock via the turbo ratios, you'll need to make sure that your Windows power profile is set to 'Balanced' or lower (the 'High Performance' profile keeps the chip at its peak turbo frequency at all times). You can use our above step-by-step guide to overclock using this approach, but instead of modifying the CPU ratio multiplier in Step one, simply modify the Turbo Boost multipliers instead.

The 'Per Core' feature allows you to assign a unique frequency to each individual core. This can be helpful if you identify that some cores are more capable of sustaining a higher frequency than others. This setting is most useful for advanced tuners and can require a fair amount of investigative work to determine the appropriate clock speed for each core. In this case, you would cycle through each core and target it individually with a stress test as you work your way through the steps above, finding the peak for each core.

How to Overclock a CPU With Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE)

We always recommend manual tuning, but Intel has its one-click auto-overclocking Intel Performance Maximizer (IPM) tool available for some chips. This utility makes overclocking simple, and it comes straight from Intel's overclocking team.

Intel's motherboard partners have also infused their boards with predefined all-core boost profiles that go by many names, such as Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) with ASUS motherboards and Enhanced Turbo with MSI motherboards. These features are largely referred to as MCE, but the functionality remains the same: These settings essentially apply an all-core overclock to the processor that is defined by the maximum Turbo Boost bin supported by the processor. This modifies the CPU's clock rate and voltage to deliver higher performance. Performance, power consumption, and heat are all affected, naturally.

Motherboard vendors predetermine the voltage settings at the factory, meaning the settings do not take chip quality into account. Instead, the vendor tests a large number of CPUs in each respective SKU and sets the parameters based on the worst common denominator. As such, these settings typically use a much higher voltage than required for even chips of "normal" quality, which can reduce the chips' lifespan and result in a hotter and noisier system. We always recommend manual tuning over MCE approaches, but if you have sufficient cooling and aren't as worried about heat generation and power efficiency, this is the quickest method. 

How to Overclock an AMD CPU

AMD's Ryzen chips don't have much manual overclocking headroom available, largely because the company's boosting algorithms automatically expose the most performance possible given the capabilities of your motherboard's power delivery subsystem and your cooler. You can choose to manually overclock your AMD CPU following the steps we outlined above, but the company's auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO) feature helps increase performance in a mostly-automated fashion and is the best option for the majority of Ryzen overclockers. Although this is an AMD-provided technique, engaging PBO does void the warranty.

AMD defines three types of power limits for its chips: PPT is the maximum power consumption allowed, TDC is the maximum sustained current, and EDC is the maximum burst current. You can override those settings either manually or with AMD's PBO. You can access this feature via either the BIOS or Ryzen Master software when you overclock in Windows 10 or Windows 11. 

PBO typically doesn't deliver huge performance gains if you adhere to the basic presets. The basic "enabled (PBO on)" preset enables significantly higher default PPT/TDC/EDC limits, but doesn't change two important settings: PBO Scalar or Clock.

PBO Scalar overrides the AMD default settings and allows increased voltage at the maximum boost frequency and lengthens boosting duration. Changing the PBO Scalar setting unlocks the best auto-overclocking performance, so the basic preset can be lacking. You can increase this value in increments of 1X, but we typically skip right to the 10X (maximum) setting. The PBO 'Clock' setting also allows the CPU to exceed its standard boost by a defined variable. We usually max this setting out, but it does have a limited impact.  

You can also use the "PBO Advanced" profile that defines the limits of each motherboard based on the capabilities of the power delivery subsystem (as defined by the motherboard vendor). This setting exposes the highest PPT, TDC, and EDC settings for the motherboard, but also doesn't change the PBO Scalar and Clock settings. However, this setting does allow you to change the PBO Scalar and Clock settings manually, with the former usually unlocking much higher auto-overclocking potential. We find that using the PBO Advanced setting with adjusted PBO Scalar and Clocks values yields the best benefits. 

Ryzen also profits handsomely from memory and fabric overclocking. As such, you should pay particular attention to tuning the chips for the best possible memory frequencies with the lowest timings. Additionally, bumping up the fabric clock (FCLK) is an important component of wringing out the most performance possible. You want this value to have a 1:1 ratio with your memory data transfer speed. For instance, a 2000 MHz FLCK with DDR4-4000 is a sweet spot for memory overclockers.

This 1:1 ratio is referred to as 'coupled mode' and is the sweet spot for Zen 2 and Zen 3 processors. You'll need to dial up the CCD and IOD voltage to achieve stability with higher (1800+) FCLK ranges. However, be aware that the peak FCLK speed can vary widely based on the generation of chip you're using, so there is a bit of luck involved. We expect most Ryzen 5000 chips to reach a 2000 MHz FCLK. 

Undervolting is another performance-tuning technique with AMD's Ryzen CPUs. This allows you to lower your voltages so the system can hit higher frequencies at lower voltages. Even though it can result in less heat, noise, and power consumption, this isn't used as commonly as PBO because it can require quite a bit more time to achieve the desired results. However, it does pay off. You can achieve this through the 'Curve Optimizer,' an advanced PBO setting that automates the process. This setting allows you to undervolt on a per-core or all-core basis (all-core is best for all but the most hardcore tuners). 

The Curve Optimizer is automated and allows you to either increase voltages or decrease them by assigning an offset — the chip's automatic mechanisms take care of the rest. You select either a 'positive' or 'negative' 'Curve Optimizer Sign' to tell the chip if you're increasing or decreasing the voltage, and then assign a 'Magnitude' value (1-30) to tell the chip how much to automatically increase/decrease the voltage throughout the voltage/frequency curve. However, this is a 'scale' value, so it doesn't have a 1:1 correlation to the actual voltage. After applying the settings, follow the stress testing and performance benchmarking advice above, logging thermals as you go, to dial in the correct setting. This technique does require quite a bit of trial and error but can pay dividends for dedicated overclockers. AMD also has an Auto Core Optimizer tool built right into its Ryzen Master software that will do the tuning for you, but it takes about an hour to run, so plan accordingly.   

CPU Overclocking Benchmark Results

Here are the results of our overclocking with Intel's Alder Lake chips compared to the Ryzen 5000 lineup in Windows 11, along with DDR4 vs DDR5 benchmarks and overclocked configurations. You can find more detailed breakdowns of our overclocking with the Core i9-12900K and i5-12600K here, and the Core i7-12700K details are here. We've overclocked the memory with these configurations, too. 

We generated these overall measurements of gaming performance as a geometric mean of our entire test suite. We also selected the most important single- and multi-threaded tests in our suite to generate those cumulative measurements. You can see an even more expansive view in our CPU Benchmark hierarchy.

As you can see above, the Alder Lake chips profit more from overclocking than the AMD Ryzen models, but both lineups do experience at least some improvement. The Core i5-12600K is a standout with a massive 15% gain in 1080p gaming performance. That's more impressive than the 9% gain you'd get from spending $110 more for the Core i7-12700K. These lower-end chips are comparatively easier to overclock, too, and don't require the highest-end cooling to pull off impressive results.

There are plenty of gains to be had for those at higher chip tiers, too. The Core i7-12700K shows similar overclocking headroom to the more expensive Core i9-12900K. After overclocking both chips, the 12700K is within 1% in gaming to the overclocked 12900K which costs a whopping $180 more. 

We see similar results with the newer 13th-Gen Intel processors, too. To represent what we think a normal user can achieve, we chose relatively mundane and simple overclocks for these chips — yet we still pulled off comparable or better gains in gaming than we would expect from moving forward to a new generation of CPUs. Even though we can't guarantee that your results will match ours, it's clear that overclocking is alive and well.

CPU Overclocking Impact on Lifespan and Reliability

Increasing the chips' frequency through overclocking requires pumping more power through the chip, thus generating more heat. If you don't manage those factors correctly, higher frequencies could result in faster aging, and thus lowered life span.

Will overclocking kill your CPU? Not if you follow common-sense steps and take a conservative approach. There are settings and techniques that overclockers can use to minimize the impact of overclocking, and if done correctly, premature chip death from overclocking isn't a common occurrence.

Intel's overclocking guru Dan Ragland has given us specific advice when it comes to overclocking when we visited the company's overclocking lab. We'll share an excerpt of those learnings here:

Every semiconductor process has a point on its voltage/frequency curve beyond which a processor will wear out at an untenable rate. If the chip wears enough, it triggers electromigration (the process of electrons slipping through the electrical pathways), which leads to premature chip death. Some factors are known to increase the rate of wear, such as the higher current and thermal density that comes as a result of overclocking.

All this means that, like the carton of milk in your refrigerator, your chip has an expiration date. Because increasing frequency through overclocking requires pumping more power through the chip, thus generating more heat, higher frequencies typically result in faster aging, and thus lowered life span. Intel's overclocking team recommends using adaptive voltage targets for overclocking and leaving C-States enabled. Not to mention using AVX offsets to keep temperatures in check during AVX-heavy workloads.

The amount of time a processor stays in elevated temperature and voltage states has the biggest impact on lifespan. You can control the temperature of your chip with better cooling, which then increases lifespan (assuming the voltage is kept constant). Assuming voltage remains constant, each successive drop in temperature results in a non-linear increase in life expectancy, so the 'first drop' in temps from 90C to 80C yields a huge increase in chip longevity. In turn, colder chips run faster at lower voltages, so dropping the temperature significantly by using a beefier cooling solution also allows you to drop the voltage further, which then helps control the voltage axis.

In the end, though, voltage is the hardest variable to contain. Ragland pointed out that voltages are really the main limiter that prevents Intel from warrantying overclocked processors, as higher voltages definitely reduce the lifespan of a processor. But Ragland has some advice: "As an overclocker, if you manage these two [voltage and temperature], but especially think about 'time in state' or 'time at high voltage,' you can make your part last quite a while if you just think about that. It's the person that sets their system up at elevated voltages and just leaves it there 24/7 [static overclock], that's the person that is going to burn that system out faster than someone who uses the normal turbo algorithms to do their overclocking so that when the system is idle your frequency drops and your voltage drops with it. So, There's a reason we don't warranty it, but there's also a way that overclockers can manage it and be a little safer."

That means manipulating the turbo boost ratio is much safer than assigning a static clock ratio via multipliers. As an additional note, you should shoot for idle temperatures below 30C, though that isn't much of a problem if you overclock via the normal turbo algorithms as described by Ragland.

Motherboard BIOS CPU Overclocking Glossary

• Voltage Mode - Auto lets the motherboard decide the voltage to apply to the processor while 'Manual' or 'Override' allows you to assign a fixed Vcore. Offset mode adds a specific amount of voltage to the processor regardless of the frequency, while Adaptive voltage increases the voltage when the processor operates in turbo mode. 
• AVX Offset - A separate multiplier that can adjust the processor frequency when it executes AVX workloads. AVX instructions yield massive speed-ups, but these instructions also generate more heat and consume more power than other types of instructions, which can lead to system instability during overclocking. Most software and games do not use AVX instructions, so dialing the AVX offset back to reduce the core frequency during these taxing workloads is critical to attaining peak performance in non-AVX applications. 
• Load-Line Calibration (LLC) - Sometimes, typically when the processor is first placed under load, the CPU doesn't receive the amount of voltage set by the user. This condition is caused by voltage droop (Vdroop) and it can result in either lower or higher voltages than intended. Load-line calibration basically compensates for Vdroop by assuring that voltages remain at a more even level. There are multiple LLC options in most motherboards, but Auto typically suffices for most users with higher-end (or newer) motherboards. 
• SpeedStep - Intel - Feature that increases or decreases processor speed and voltage according to system load. 
• Uncore - Intel - Regulates the frequency of the different controllers on the processor like the L3 cache, ring bus, memory controller, etc. 
• FCLK - Intel - Controls the speed at which data is passed from the processor to the graphics card. AMD - Specifies the Infinity Fabric frequency (important for memory overclocking) 
• VCCSA - Voltage for the System Agent. Increasing this voltage can help stability when overclocking the ring bus and cache frequency. 
• VCCIO - Voltage for the memory controller and shared cache. 
• Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) - Enables the XMP profile on compatible memory kits. XMP profiles apply pre-validated memory overclocks by simply toggling the feature on in either the BIOS or a software overclocking utility.

• MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
• MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
• MORE: AMD vs Intel
• MORE: Ryzen 7000 All We Know
• MORE: Raptor Lake All We Know
• MORE: How to check your CPU temperature
  

Overclocking your graphics card can improve its performance by 5% to as much as 15% (or more), depending on the particular card model. Of course, as with any overclocking, care should be taken to avoid running your GPU at unsafe settings. But if you have one of the best graphics cards and you're looking to eke out a bit more performance, we'll discuss how we go about overclocking and determining "safe" settings.

Before overclocking, it's useful to get a baseline measurement of how your graphics card performs. You want to be able to see how much faster your PC runs after tuning, after all — if performance doesn't improve, you'll want to know. Check our guide on how to test graphics card performance, and you'll also want to check your graphics card temperatures and clock speeds.

Once you have your baseline stock performance data, it's time to start overclocking. There are a variety of utilities, but we're going to focus on MSI Afterburner, which is one of the most popular and commonly used GPU overclocking tools. The same basic process can be used with other utilities, including EVGA Precision X1, Asus GPU Tweak, and other graphics card vendor utilities. It's also possible to overclock AMD and Nvidia GPUs using the built-in utility in AMD's drivers or Nvidia's GeForce Experience, which we'll cover below, but we'll start with the universal approach to overclocking your GPU.

Please note that overclocking very much depends on the "silicon lottery." Just because one person with a "HappyGPUs RTX 4090 X-Factor-Wow" model card (that's a made up name, if you couldn't tell) managed a 20% core overclock and a 25% memory overclock doesn't mean that every RTX 4090 card will hit those same clocks, or even that the same model will reach similar clocks. Case in point: Even though all the RTX 4090 cards we've seen so far appear to use Micron 21Gbps GDDR6X memory ("D8BZC" labeled chips), we've seen maximum stable memory overclocks range from 22.6Gbps to as high as 25Gbps.

Overclocking With MSI Afterburner

Here's the main interface for MSI Afterburner, using the v3 skin. It shows sliders for core voltage, power limit, core clock, memory clock, and fan speed. By default, Afterburner locks out voltage adjustments. If you want to play with that option, go into the settings and check the box for "Unlock voltage control." You can try setting it to reference design, standard MSI, extended MSI, or third party — some cards will only allow voltage adjustments with the correct mode, and some might not allow it at all.

One option for overclocking is to use the automatic OC scanner tool. Press Ctrl+F, then click the OC Scanner button in the top-right corner and let it do its thing. This is supposed to make overclocking easier, but as with most auto-tuning utilities, your mileage may vary. We've had it crash, we've had it generate unstable overclocks, and sometimes it doesn't even match a quick and dirty +150 MHz (or whatever) manual overclock. It doesn't do anything for memory clocks either, so you'll likely end up going the manual route. The OC scanner can take 20 minutes to run, and most of the time, you can get a quick and easy overclock much faster on your own.

My approach is to fire up a graphically intense game or benchmark that will run in a window, then I run the game at 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 (depending on the GPU I'm using) and get to a spot where nothing is going to kill me. From there, I switch over to Afterburner and start trying some adjustments. Note that you'll want a game or test that doesn't stop rendering when you leave focus (so if it shows the menu when you Alt+Tab, that's not going to work).

There are four primary points of interest when overclocking a graphics card: GPU core clock, memory clock, GPU voltage, and fan speed. (In some cases, you can also adjust memory voltage.) I start by finding the maximum "stable" core clock, then I find the maximum "stable" memory clock, and then I try to find a blend of the two that results in optimal performance.

Note that "stable" is in quotation marks because even if the initial testing seems to work fine, there will often be exceptions where some games or applications crash while others work. When that happens, you'll have to go back to tune the settings and see if you can find some that allow the game to run properly. As you can probably guess, the more demanding the game (i.e., if it uses ray tracing or other advanced features), the more likely it is to require additional fine tuning and lower clocks.

For this tutorial, we'll use Cyberpunk 2077, running in a window at 2560x1440 with RT-Ultra settings and DLSS Quality mode, to find a reasonable overclock for a GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. That ticks all the boxes for a demanding game that will likely push the GPU to its limits, and it also has a built-in benchmark that will let us see what happens to performance after tuning.

We started with a GPU core overclock. After loading the game and applying the appropriate settings, we maxed out the power limit and set the fan speed to 80% to ensure the GPU and memory stayed cool. Everything was fine so far, and we applied a 100 MHz offset to the GPU core. That worked okay, which is almost always the case — if you can't get at least a 100 MHz core overclock, you probably shouldn't worry about going any further with your particular graphics card.

With that initial performance boost in play, we then tried a 150 MHz core overclock… and Cyberpunk 2077 almost immediately crashed. We tried maxing out the core voltage after restarting the game, and it still crashed, which means a 150 MHz offset won't work. We split the difference and dropped to 125 MHz, which also crashed. It appeared reasonably stable after maxing out the core voltage at +100 but still crashed after several minutes.

Ultimately, +100 MHz on the GPU cores appears to be as far as we're likely to get with this particular card, though do note that the increased power limit means we're running quite a bit faster than at stock — GPU clocks hovered around 1755 MHz at stock, compared to 1905 MHz with our overclock. A big chunk of that comes thanks to the increased power limit, as even with a 0 MHz GPU overclock, we saw average clocks of 1875 MHz in our testing.

Next, we worked on a memory overclock. We dropped the GPU core clock back to +0 MHz but left the power limit at the maximum (114% on this card). There's usually a fair amount of headroom, so we started with a +750 MHz offset on the GDDR6X memory. That gives an effective memory clock of 21Gbps, and after several minutes of running around in the game, we figured it was working fine. +1000 MHz (21.5Gbps) also appeared stable, as did +1250 MHz (22Gbps), but +1500MHz immediately crashed our PC and forced a system restart. Did we mention overclocking can be a trial and error process?

After additional tinkering and testing, we combined the GPU and VRAM overclocks to end up with +100 MHz on the GPU core and +1000 MHz on the GDDR6X memory. Note that Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs have "error detect and retry" (EDR) on the memory, which can sometimes obscure borderline unstable overclocks, and we figured 21.5Gbps was sufficiently fast.

GPU Overclocking Performance

What did the above do for performance? Here's how the stock, GPU core only, VRAM only, and GPU plus VRAM overclocks fared at 4K RT-Ultra with DLSS Quality in the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark. We also tested a second game, Borderlands 3, at 4K and Badass settings with the same four GPU settings.

We'll forgive you if that feels underwhelming. Ultimately, our maximum GPU overclock improved performance on the RTX 3090 by 8.6% in Borderlands 3 and 8.5% in Cyberpunk 2077. Most of those gains came from the GPU core overclock, which improved performance by 7.3% in Borderlands 3 and 7.5% in Cyberpunk 2077. Meanwhile, just overclocking the VRAM improved performance by 2.1% in Borderlands 3 and 6.0% in Cyberpunk 2077.

Your actual gains can vary a lot, depending on your graphics card. For example, the RTX 3090 isn't known for being memory bandwidth starved in most cases, but the reference model definitely runs into power limits at stock. That's why the core overclock mattered more than the VRAM overclock. Still, the results we've shown above aren't atypical for graphics card overclocking, and we usually see about a 5–10% improvement in performance.

AMD and Nvidia "Built-In" Overclocking

You can use other utilities to overclock your GPU, but if you don't want to bother with MSI Afterburner, you should probably just use the built-in tools provided by AMD and Nvidia. Nvidia provides an auto-tuning tool and you can specify voltage and power limits, a temperature target, and a fan speed target. After that, you just leave it up to the drivers, which will overclock the GPU cores — but not the VRAM, so you're potentially missing out on a decent chunk of untapped performance.

AMD's overclocking tools built into Radeon Settings are far more useful. You can do everything you need, specifying voltages, clock speeds, fan speeds, memory speeds, and more. You can also ask the drivers to overclock the VRAM or the GPU — but not both. Alternatively, it can auto-undervolt the GPU, which reduces performance a bit but also tends to lower temperatures and power use. Basically, you don't need a separate GPU overclocking utility, though we still generally find MSI Afterburner to be more familiar and easier to use.

One big benefit of AMD's overclocking tools is that you can specify per-game OC profiles. Maybe one game isn't as intense and you can push clocks higher, or maybe you have a game that just needs the extra oomph to provide a smoother gameplay experience. It can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it, though ultimately, it will often still come down to trial and error.

Bottom Line: GPU Overclocking

Should you overclock your graphics card? We could be cheeky and say that if you need to ask, you should probably just leave well enough alone. The reality is that AMD and Nvidia — and their graphics card partners — tend to bin the chips and push performance nearly to the limit. Overclocking also increases the power use and often the temperature of your graphics card, which can cause it to wear out sooner. But perhaps even worse than that is the fact that overclocking usually only improves performance by 5–10%.

That might be noticeable, to some people, without running a bunch of benchmarks. In practice, there's usually not enough headroom that it's worth the hassle. You can give the auto-tuning options in the AMD and Nvidia drivers a shot, and that will probably get you at least half of what you'd get with manual tuning. Plus, it's a simple flip of a switch rather than something that requires a lot of trial and error.

As someone who has done a lot of overclocking over the years, I can say that one of the worst feelings is when you're in the middle of a game and it suddenly crashes due to a formerly "stable" overclock. You're then in the unenviable position of wondering if there's a bug in the game, if your overclock pushed things too far, or if there's something else wrong with your PC. I've lost countless hours troubleshooting my PCs, and these days I just don't find GPU overclocking to be particularly important. Applying upscaling of some form (DLSS, FSR2, XeSS, or even just a spatial upscaling filter) can provide a much larger performance improvement without increasing power use or affecting system stability.

You don't have to agree with me, however; perhaps your particular hardware will deliver a bigger boost in performance after tuning. Just keep an eye on your GPU and VRAM temperatures, and don't forget to give your PC a regular cleaning to keep it running smoothly. Also, don't go into GPU overclocking expecting a 20% improvement or more in performance, because those days are far in the past — unless you use liquid nitrogen.

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AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs appear to have launched with a modicum of susceptibility to damage from enthusiastic tinkerers. Now we know that this kind of serious damage is a thing, rather than a fluke, we are keen to know what exactly is going on. Some of the first considered analysis comes courtesy of Igor’s Lab, which has just published a report and findings based upon a fatally damaged CPU’s pins.

A recent story concerning a burned-out Ryzen 7000X3D has captivated us over recent days. When a PC goes seriously wrong, it isn’t often the CPU to blame, and they also aren’t often damaged by consumers post-installation. In this case, highlighted in our report from Friday using Redditor Speedrookie’s information and pictures, the CPU is most definitely seriously damaged - but it looks like the motherboard is to blame.

There wasn’t enough evidence to draw conclusions when the story broke. Our initial thoughts were that the visible damage was related to the CCD chiplet with 3D V-Cache SRAM tile on top overheating. Last month, we saw expert overclocker der8auer share a video where he accidentally fried a Ryzen 7000X3D by being too reckless with voltage.

However, the tweaks applied would have been comfortable for a Ryzen chip without 3D V-Cache. Igor’s Lab editor Igor Wallossek discussed pin analysis theories with overclocker der8auer for roughly half an hour, to ensure he had a plausible theory to share regarding Speedrookie’s CPU.

Igor’s Lab worked to align AMD pinout diagrams with superimposed images of Speedrookie’s damaged CPU. Despite numerous complaints about the AMD source documentation, Igor thinks that an accurate overlay was achieved for a better understanding of the damage.

According to the investigative overlay work, the catastrophic physical damage zone corresponds to CPU pins that supply power to the cores. “All affected contacts supply the CPU with the VDDCR (CPU Core Power Supply),” wrote Igor’s Lab.

The above observation answers the question regarding the most seriously visibly damaged area of the chip, but raises further questions. For example, the investigator asks whether some pins had been physically damaged prior to this failure, or whether there was a short circuit in the CPU first. Moreover, Igor’s Lab rules out the following: defective spring contacts, bad assembly, or a bad socket batch.

The source publication admits that its investigations can’t really go further without the damaged goods in hand. However, there is likely going to be more to the tale of Speedrookie’s CPU. Reddit posts indicate that though AMD and Asus had invited returns of the damaged products, Gamers Nexus' Steve Burke beat them to it by purchasing the damaged high-tech remnants. Expect to see some GN-branded investigation videos in the not-too-distant future.

Earlier today we reported on MSI restricting voltages on Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs in a new motherboard BIOS update. The only voltage adjustments permitted going forward are negative offsets.

Famous overclocker der8auer visited Asus HQ this week and killed a shiny new AMD Ryzen 7000X3D with alarming ease. The 3D V-Cache enhanced Ryzen 9 7950X3D didn’t last long in overclocking tests, after tweaked voltages and lashings of liquid nitrogen cooling were applied. However, the untimely death of this CPU will ultimately save others, as Asus / AMD will “probably” implement a 1.35V ceiling on X3D processors in upcoming motherboard BIOS updates.

Der8auer  is currently documenting a trip to Taiwan via YouTube. After quaffing a pint of the local bubble tea, he headed to Asus HQ for some computer testing and overclocking fun. The TechTuber explained it had been around seven years since his last visit to the tech treasure island, mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic and travel restrictions.

After several days of Intel Sapphire Rapids testing, Der8auer was offered the opportunity to test the latest AMD Ryzen 7000X3D processors at Asus’ well-equipped labs. The expert overclocker had a feeling that there could be a “great risk” in undertaking such an endeavor, due to AMD’s warnings and locking down of the previous gen X3D parts (AMD Ryzen 5000X3D processors). However, with the latest gen, AMD has relaxed things a little, allowing more tweakability for those who like to dabble.

Using a Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme, der8auer began his investigations into performance and power. At the start of this section of the video, the overclocker says that the CPU typically ran at 1V, but the Crosshair motherboard allowed him to pump up the voltage to 1.35V, as a modest but worthwhile first step in LN2-fuelled overclocking. The observed temperatures of <90°C with liquid nitrogen cooling were comfortably near to what would be expected at stock voltages using an AiO liquid cooler.

Encouraged by the success of the overvolting and stability of the system, der8auer decided on a next step of 1.55V. He explained that this kind of voltage was a significant ramp up from stock, but would be a typical next step in exploring the capabilities of a modern Intel CPU or AMD CPU without 3D V-Cache.

Upon restart, right after the BIOS screen flew past, the open bench testing system fell flat, with the motherboard showing an ominous 00 error code. The usual means of error recovery didn’t revive this system, and subsequent investigations revealed that the CPU was stone dead. Der8auer’s video voiceover asserts that the demise of the CPU was entirely unexpected, especially as it only managed to run past the BIOS screen, and no testing or computational load was exerted using the new voltage.

The YouTuber didn’t want to draw conclusions about safe voltages for the Ryzen 7000X3D series based on a sample of one, but reported back to Asus, who will probably limit the max manual selectable voltage for X3D chips to 1.35V. He surmised that the voltage being so configurable, and options up to 2.5V being available, was probably an oversight by AMD motherboard partners and needed to be fixed.

Elsewhere in der8auer’s video, you can watch some Sapphire Rapids OC fun, look at some overclocking hardware prototypes, and more. The 35-minute video is well worth a watch. You can enjoy the full video above.

A South Korean YouTuber has shared a quick and slick method for delidding one of AMD’s latest and greatest Zen 4 desktop CPUs. Tassi Ham published a brief Shorts video, showing how to quickly remove an AMD Ryzen 7000 series integrated heat spreader (IHS) using nothing more than a little dental floss and a household iron.

There is a certain technique to be observed before attempting this dental floss delidding technique on your own precious new Ryzen 7000 series CPU. The essential step in using floss to detach AMD’s IHS is threading the flossing thread behind an ‘octopus’ leg (the tabs that secure the IHS to the CPU), and then pulling the loop slowly yet firmly towards you, and away from the CPU. Continue to do this for each of the eight legs, and you have completed step one of two.

Watching Tassi Ham complete this octopus leg detaching process isn’t as nerve-wracking as a typical delidding video with sharp metal tools involved. The slim, possibly waxed (mint is my favorite), thread at no time threatens the delicate exposed surface mount electronic components near the octopus leg fixing points. During the act of slicing through the fixing glue, the process seems smooth and doesn’t look like it requires a great deal of exertion for success.

Step two uses another regular household device:  a clothes iron. Heat up your iron, with its surface pointing upwards to create a platform, then add a small blob of thermal paste (we don't advise using toothpaste for this) to the CPU IHS and place it (IHS-down) onto the hot surface of the iron. Just “30 seconds” later, the IHS will be ready to detach with very little effort. In the video, Tassi Ham used some spaghetti tongs, but most tongs or tweasers with soft (plastic, wood) grips would probably be suitable for this. Sadly, Tassi Ham fumbled this part, and dropped the delidded CPU on his desk, but there appeared to be no harm done.

Seeing a YouTuber upholding the true spirit of computer DIY, using surprising ‘tools’ anyone might have around the home for a delicate electronic process, is heartening. In some ways we are reminded of the overclocking pencil trick from the start of the millennium. Lastly, the ‘dental floss’ method makes custom CNC tools for Ryzen 7000 delidding, like this one from Der8auer, look somewhat over-engineered.

YouTube’s ScatterBencher has managed to overclock the new AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D to 5.9 GHz. Successfully overclocking these chips is no simple feat, and the skilled YouTuber (also known as Massman on HWBot) has published a detailed blog talking through three strategies to get the most out of your new Zen 4 with 3D V-Cache desktop processor.

AMD’s 3D V-Cache enhanced 7000 Series CPUs aren’t as locked down as the previous generation X3D processors, and therefore provide several angles for overclockers to exploit. ScatterBencher decided to overclock his 7950X3D with the help of the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme motherboard and its highly configurable BIOS. Other key components worth mentioning were the ElmorLabs Easy Fan Controller ElmorLabs EVC2SX, an EK-Quantum Velocity2 EK-Quantum Power Kit Velocity2 360 CPU cooler, and the memory used was a G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5-6400 kit. These same components were used for stock reference stats and all three overclocking strategies outlined below. However, please note that the G.Skill memory was run at DDR5-6000 for extra stability.

ScatterBencher first looked at stock performance across a host of industry standard benchmarks with his capable setup – this obviously gives us a baseline to judge the OC attempts. In the graphics we have reproduced below, the stock performance in the various tests are represented by the blue bars, and overclocking gains are green extensions.

The three overclocking strategies tested were; the use of AMD’s PBO 2 and EXPO, the use of PBO tuned using Curve Optimizer, and the use of PBO with an ECLK boost. The second and third methods of overclocking were significantly more successful at squeezing out extra CPU performance, as you can see from the charts above. The methodology which scored the headlining 5.9 GHz CPU clocks was the second one, using the Curve Optimizer AMD introduced with its Ryzen Master software last year, for use with the Zen 3 architecture processors.

ScatterBencher talked us through the process of using the PBO 2 Curve Optimizer. In brief, he will broadly tune the whole CPU using a negative curve offset, gradually dropping the curve until the point of instability. He will simultaneously gradually increase Fmax Boost Override. Later, tuning is narrowed down to a per-core basis. As you can imagine, making small per-core adjustments then running through benchmarks with a CPU with 16 physical cores can be quite time consuming.

During his overclocking tests with the top-end Ryzen 9 7950X3D, ScatterBencher made some interesting observations. For example, he provided some analysis of the System Management Unit (SMU) which enables PBO 2 on these chips. He also remarked upon the “severely more constrained,” CCD with V-Cache, and its impacts on overclocking strategy / methods. Head on over to the ScatterBencher blog for more details, or sit back and watch the half-hour video embedded below, if you prefer.

One of the most popular GPU performance monitoring and tuning tools is "probably dead," its developer has announced. Alexey 'Unwinder' Nicolaychuk is the Russian developer of MSI Afterburner, and took to the Guru3D forums last week to explain that progress has already been halted for nearly a year due to the "politic[al] situation." This is obviously a reference to the Ukraine war and sanctions on Russia, supported by many companies, such as MSI and Asus.

The news regarding the end of MSI Afterburner development came to light as forum members were talking with 'Unwinder' about using the tool with the new AMD Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards like the RX 7900 XT. In response to a query about upcoming support for the new RDNA3 GPUs, the developer made it clear that anyone waiting for new GPU support will probably be waiting a very long time. Actually, MSI Afterburner may even have reached the end of its development already.

'Unwinder' informed his forum-mates that MSI Afterburner has already been in stasis for some time. It has been almost a year since MSI collaborated with the Russian developer on the software. Apparently, the Afterburner license agreement that was key to the company / developer relationship was effectively dissolved about 11 months ago. 'Unwinder' has tried to continue to update and refine the project without the support of MSI's hardware and software resources, but he opined that the job has been like "flogging a dead horse." He said he would continue to offer some support for the GPU tool in his spare time, but he will likely have to now focus on other paid projects, simply to pay the bills.

MSI Responds: It's Not Dead. It's Getting Better!

This story seems to be developing fast, with MSI keen to make sure its popular Afterburner app continues on. Our colleagues at PC Gamer have gotten a statement from MSI, which should put some worries to rest. "We fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner," a rep told the publication. "MSI have been working on a solution and expect it to be resolved soon."

Whether or not that "solution" would involve the original developer was briefly up in the air, until WCCF editor Hassan Mujtaba posted a response from MSI on Twitter. "Our product marketing & accounting team are dealing with this problem now," an MSI rep reportedly told Mujtaba. "Due to the war, our payment couldn't transfer to the author's bank account successfully. We are still keeping in touch with him and figuring out how to solve this."

So it seems like now that the Afterburner situation has come under a public spotlight, MSI is suddenly eager to figure out how to pay Nicolaychuk for his ongoing efforts. Hopefully, that will include compensation for the last year of development, as well as some quick work getting support going for AMD's latest cards, and improving support for Nvidia's 40-series GPUs as well.

We've reached out to MSI with some questions of our own, and will update this story if we get any more substantive information from the company. 

Stick to the Official MSI Afterburner Site for Downloads

As of now, the last stable release of MSI Afterburner is dated December 2021. If you are using a supported GPU and still use Afterburner by default on new builds, please make sure you check the official site only for downloads and updates. Last November, MSI Afterburner was in the news for being targeted by malware distributors, who set up fake but convincing-looking download websites. The genuine download is still available direct from MSI, with no hint given about the development being on-hold (or worse),  despite the news above.

Users on the lookout for an alternative up-to-date overclocking and undervolting tool for their GPU might check with their specific GPU vendor, or consider universal alternatives like Asus' GPU Tweak. AMD GPU users also have some pretty extensive tools in the Adrenalin Edition Software they will have installed (check under the Performance tab).

RTSS Development Continues

In some better news from 'Unwinder,' in the same forum thread, he confirms that development of RTSS (the popular RivaTuner Statistics Server) is a separate hobby project, not dependent on MSI, so it is very much alive and kicking, and will continue to "get future updates and support."

According to a report from hardwareLuxx, Raptor Lake's 9GHz world record was achieved using a brand new LN2 pot named the Volcano, and from January 5 you'll be able to buy your own from EmorLabs for $250. 

Volcano was developed by overclocker ShaggySVK and supports a combination of liquid nitrogen (LN2) and liquid helium cooling, not just liquid nitrogen. The pot itself features a matte black finish container measuring 83.1mm paired with a full copper core at the bottom. It supports almost every single CPU socket from Intel and AMD, including AM2 all the way to AM5, and LGA 775 all the way to the LGA 20xx sockets found in Intel's HEDT chips. We don't have all the dimensions of the pot itself, but it stands tall, approximately the height of a 100mm or 120mm tower cooler.

To maximize the effective cooling, the copper core features a plethora of holes and dimples for the cooling liquid to saturate. These holes extend all the way through the
copper core, with the exception of the bottom where the surface is flat to make maximum contact with the CPU. Again, the pot is capable of utilizing both liquid nitrogen and liquid helium cooling at the same time.

Liquid helium is a more aggressive cooling solution compared to liquid nitrogen, with extreme thermal properties producing a lower temperature. When used correctly in an overclocking application, it can drop CPU temperatures even further than what liquid nitrogen alone is capable of.
This is how the Raptor Lake world record was broken. Asus' team of overclockers used a combination of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to push the 13900K to 9GHz. To add, one of the overclocks that helped break the record said Raptor Lake was one of the most stable chips he had seen under liquid helium.

Once the Volcano is available for purchase, it will come as a bundle that includes a variety of accessories, including mounting brackets, screws, springs, washers, sandpaper, and more.

Intel's plans for the workstation market with its Sapphire Rapids-WS are taking shape as a well-known hardware leaker published preliminary specifications for the new CPUs. Intel's lineup of next-generation Xeon products for workstations and high-end desktops will include overclockable CPUs with up to 56 cores, eight memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes if the information revealed by reputable hardware leaker Enthusiastic Citizen (ECSM_Official) is correct.

The New Family of Workstation CPUs from Intel

Intel's family of next-generation Xeon W processors for W790-based workstations will reportedly consist of two families of products that will offer slightly different capabilities. The Xeon W 3400-series CPUs will be derived from a multi-chiplet Sapphire Rapids design and will feature up to 56 cores, eight DDR5 memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes. In addition, CPU cores used by these processors will be Golden Cove-derived cores with AVX-512 and AMX instructions enabled. By contrast, the Xeon W-2400-series processors will use a single-die design with up to 24 cores, four DDR5 memory channels, and 64 PCIe lanes. 

Intel's Xeon W-2400 and W3400-series processors are expected to come in LGA4677 packaging and use W790-based workstation motherboards. One of the first W790 mainboards leaked last week, which suggests that some of Intel's partners are getting ready to ship these products sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, a rumor suggests that Intel only intends to roll out its W790 platform next April, so it is too early to ship appropriate motherboards. Then again, Intel has never officially confirmed the launch timeframe for its W790 platform and only confirmed that this one is designed for workstations.

Intel Xeon W-3400: Up to 56 Overclockable Cores

Intel's Xeon W-3400-series lineup will allegedly include nine models, four of which will be overclockable. Even the flagship Xeon W9-3495X is expected to come with an unlocked multiplier making for overclocking support. 

Linux boot logs unearthed earlier this year essentially confirm the existence of Intel's Xeon W-3400-series CPUs (which come with AVX-512 and AMX enabled). Still, they also mention the Xeon W9-3495 (non-X) CPU clocked at 1.80 GHz base, which Enthusiastic Citizen does not list. We have no idea whether Intel changed its plans concerning its Sapphire Rapids-WS lineup since July, but we are dealing with preliminary information, so some details may be inaccurate. 

Intel's Xeon W-3400-series relies on Sapphire Rapids silicon, which will offer AVX-512 support and AMX instructions for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. Advanced Matrix Extensions is a tiled matrix multiplication accelerator, a grid of fused multiply-add units supporting BF16 and INT8 input types that can be programmed using only 12 instructions and perform up to 1024 TMUL BF16 or 2048 TMUL INT8 operations per cycle per core.

Currently, there are no workstation-grade CPUs featuring up to 56 cores and AVX-512 instructions, so this will be a tangible advantage of Intel's X-3400-series processors over existing AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX-series products. Meanwhile, AMD is working on the next-generation Zen 4-based Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000WX family codenamed Storm Peak that will also support AVX-512, but we have no idea when these CPUs are set to become available. 

What will truly set Intel's Xeon W-3400 apart from the competition is AMX support since these instructions will make it extremely competitive in AI/ML and other types of matrix multiplication workloads. One may argue that workstations hardly run such applications, but someone has to develop and try AMX-supporting applications on something, and they will likely opt for a Xeon W-3400-based machine. Furthermore, once workstation programs learn how to use AMX properly, Sapphire Rapids-WS-based devices will have an advantage over the competition for some time.

Intel Xeon W-2400: Up to 24 Overclockable Cores

Intel's Xeon W-2400-series family will reportedly comprise eight SKUs, four of which will be overclockable. While we cannot state this for sure, but we suspect that the W2000-series will use Intel's 34-core Raptor Lake-S silicon. Meanwhile, even the range-topping Xeon W7-2495X features 24 cores with Hyper-Threading. Perhaps, Intel yet has to disclose additional Xeon W-2400-series models with higher core counts to partners. Or maybe the company decided to sacrifice eight cores for additional yields, clocks, or perhaps decent clocks for AVX-512. 

Three interesting SKUs that Intel allegedly has in the Xeon W-2400 lineup are the eight-core W5-2435 as well as the six-core W3-2425 and W3-2423 processors. Assuming that these chips can be overclocked by raising BCLK frequency (we are not sure this will work on a workstation-grade W790 platform, but who knows?), they will certainly attract the attention of the world's top professional overclockers. Meanwhile, we can only wonder whether these parts will be successful commercially or share the fate of Intel's Kaby Lake-X processors for the X299 platform aimed at enthusiasts. 

It is noteworthy that the Xeon W4-2423 processor does not support Hyper-Threading, according to Enthusiastic Citizen, which is a big surprise for a 2023 workstation processor. Interestingly, there are also Xeon W5-3433 and W5-3423 processors in the 3400-series family, but there is no word whether they support simultaneous multithreading.

Worthy Contender? Maybe

Intel's Xeon W-3000 and W-2000-series processors could give AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro a good run for their money if the information is correct. Yet, while Enthusiastic Citizen tends to be very accurate and therefore has a good reputation, we are still dealing with unofficial information, so take it with a grain of salt. 

Intel has done the impossible. While looking down the barrel of the Ryzen 4 launch, they have managed something they haven’t been able to (or been pushed to) do in recent times: give us incredible performance at incredible pricing. And, if you’re an overclocker like me, the new 13th Gen “Raptor Lake” chips make it easy to get speeds in high 7 GHz range on multiple cores or over 8 GHz on a single core.

The top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K, which I pushed all the way to 8.2 GHz, has a mere $589 MSRP (though it’s over $600 in more places right now). Let’s not forget the not so distant Intel Extreme Edition days where the top dog of the mainstream and or recently deceased high end desktop segment was always $999-$1099. At nearly half that price with 24 Cores and 32 threads, the Core i9-13900K is a win for consumers. 

While some will argue that the lesser-core count Core i5-13600K and Core i7-13700K are the true price / performance winners, I would rather lift my silver spoon, raise my pinky and enjoy the top dog 13900K (or top dinosaur). Let’s overclock this thing.

As a professional overclocker, I look forward to different challenges at each new hardware release. In this case though, overclocking Raptor lake is exactly the same as overclocking Alder Lake. Don’t cry for me yet though. More on that later.

Overclocking these chips on ambient temperatures (traditional liquid or air cooling) is ridiculous. Single threaded benchmarks like Superpi32m can loop easily over 6100 Mhz without using what I consider ridiculous voltages. Multi-threaded benches like Cinebench R23 on most of the units I've tried can run at 5.7 GHz on all performance threads while set at under 1.3 volts. 

You can easily speculate where the future 13900KS, which promises up to 6 GHz at stock, will end up frequency-wise especially if Intel is skimming the best dies to save for those currently. You are still going to benefit from the Thermal Grizzly OC Frame and will of course want to buy the best thermal paste that you feel is affordable to you.

What does it take to cool the Core i9-13900K? You can use an inexpensive solution if you want, but the quality of your experience on these chips is directly proportional to the quality of your cooling. 

If you have a stock LGA775 intel heatsink set on top of your motherboard, your chip will run lower frequency and dial its own voltages back to stay within its thermal limits. If you have a monster Ice Giant Elite or similar high end air cooler you will be rewarded with more performance, even if you don’t tweak a single setting.

With a high-end air cooling setup, an IceGiant ProSiphon Elite, I was able to run single threaded benchmarks at 6.1 GHz and multithreaded tests at 5.5 to 5.6 GHz, depending on the load.

Here’s a word on temperatures and “running hot.” I’ve read countless articles and seen endless YouTube thumbnails of fire emojis and face palms talking about thermals on the latest-gen processors. After speaking to some of my engineer friends on both sides, these are often clickbait. If you have built PCs for any amount of significant time, you know that, when your processor hits 95 to 100C, most temperature monitoring software turns the text red to warn you of overheating. However, its important to remember that 100C is within the normal specifications for the processor. In fact, even at stock settings, the chip tries to run at 100C under load to provide the highest performance possible — that’s part of the ABT boosting tech. 

Intel’s new chips are resilient, and the company has even added the ability to increase the throttle point for the chips in the BIOS (not all motherboard makers support this yet), but like increasing voltage during overclocking, it voids the warranty (and could shorten the lifetime of your chip). In this case, lifting the limits results in a stage 1 throttle at 107C and stage 2 at 115C. For some perspective, solder doesn’t melt until it gets up to over 300C. 

What am I trying to say? Intel sets the limits on your thermals and wants to RMA as few units as possible, so it has built in some tolerance even over 100C. So even though it feels like pushing the envelope to higher temps, the chip will be just fine running at 100C. Enjoy your high frequencies, Your Raptor Lake CPU will adapt itself voltage and clock wise to its conditions. 

This brings us to Z690 vs Z790. Most high-end Z690 motherboards are great options for Raptor Lake, provided you have updated their BIOSes (see our story on how to avoid BIOS update issues with Z690 and 13th Gen Core) Frankly I don’t see any reason at all to upgrade. For all of my benchmarking scores I'm still using my same ASRock Z690 Aqua that I was sampled what seems like ages ago and I don't feel held back or restricted in any way. Kudos to Intel for the backwards compatibility and even the option to stick with DDR4 RAM if you’re feeling budget conscious.

Finally, let’s talk about the extreme overclocking part. Remember when I said it was essentially the same process to overclock Raptor Lake and Alder Lake? It is except one big bad difference for XOCer’s — Many of the highest-quality chips have a cold bug. Over half of them do. This makes binning (or the processes of finding the best CPUs) a heartbreaking endeavor. You find your potential best chips on ambient cooling first. Then test them one by one on LN2 as some scale better than others with lower temperatures and higher voltages.

A CPU capable of working at -192C is the first requirement. If it is -189C or even -190C, it is not enough and is rejected. You can have a wonderful unit that does 5.8 GHz using very low voltage on ambient cooling, that then has a cold bug at -185c that is deemed useless for extreme overclocking. This is a painful process and has contributed greatly to my gray hair. 

After trying half a dozen or so cold bug-free CPUs, I found that the best can run at 7.5 - 7.7 GHz on multi-threaded benchmarks and at 8.2 GHz on single threaded tests! The clock rates that Raptor Lake can run on threaded benchmarks are what Alder Lake could barely suicide validate (run just long enough to register) in CPU-Z. This is truly remarkable and I’m impressed with what Intel has been able to pull out of its sleeve. 

To give some perspective, the 24-core, 32-thread Core i9-13900K dominates AMD’s 3960X Thread Ripper (24-cores, 48-threads), which retailed for $2,000 at launch, with 16 less threads and without 24 “real” cores. It also is able to edge out the Ryzen 7950X 16-core, 32 thread AMD processor in productivity benchmarks like Geekbench. 

While running Geekbench 3, I got the 13900K’s P-cores up to 5.6 GHz on air cooling for a multicore score of 103,766. When I switched to LN2, my P-core clock speed increased to 7.5 GHz, which gave me a multicore score of 157,211. At its best, AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 7950X hit 6.8 GHz on LN2 and it returned a multicore score of 145,577.

A good friend and all around amazing asset to the overclocking community, Elmor was able to finally take the frequency world record at 8.812MHz with the Core i9-13900K. That’s a  truly amazing feat of skill. Huge congratulations to him and ASUS for putting on a great show. You can watch him break it on YouTube. 

Galax has a reputation for pushing Nvidia GPUs to extremes with its halo products. Among the best graphics cards, niche enthusiasts will be familiar with its Hall of Fame (HOF) line of products that sit at pinnacle of extreme performance. The latest Galax RTX 4090 HOF kicks things up a notch, an outlandish take on an already edgy product. Galax has the gall to fit this GeForce RTX 4090 with twin 16-pin power connectors and a BIOS ready to deliver up to 1000W to the GPU — hopefully without any potentially melting adapters.

Swedish tech site Nordic Hardware received the above images from their fellow countryman, overclocking legend Rauf, who is currently placed 5th in HWBot's world rankings. The images show an attractive icy white PCB featuring the best power design Galax can muster, as well as the two headlining 16-pin 12VHPWR connector ports.

If you count the components on the PCB, you'll tally the boxy chokes and determine this particular HOF design features 28 VRM phases for the GPU, plus another four for the memory. That's a substantial power delivery setup, designed to stably deliver a large amount of current under the most extreme of use cases, like liquid nitrogen.

The design of the Galax RTX 4090 HOF allows extreme overclockers to crank up to 1000W through the dual 16-pin power connectors for all sorts of overclocking hijinks. The 1000W allowed by the BIOS is considerably higher than the max wattage we've seen from any of the RTX 4090 cards we've reviewed, which achieved a maximum of around 600W with overclocking. Pushing that 400W higher makes us a little concerned, but then this is no ordinary card.

If you'd like to purchase a Galax GeForce RTX 4090 HOF, Rauf hasn't shared any details on pricing or availability. Apparently, the launch date will coincide with Rauf and a few other select extreme overclockers releasing a flurry of overclocking results and benchmark scores. We'll keep our eyes peeled for the expected toppling of a wide range of graphics card performance world records, so stay tuned.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 power cable melting issue continues to confound. As more information is dug up and presented, the picture isn’t always becoming clearer. The RTX 4090 may be one of the best graphics cards, but it's in a difficult spot right now in terms of supply, pricing, and whether or not the adapters are 'safe' for long-term use. We'll need Nvidia to publish an official statement about the observed issues, as there appear to be so many variables that even the biggest tech sites and video channels haven't been able to come to any helpful conclusions.

For example, on Saturday we reported on Igor’s Labs’ findings with regard to the underlying factors causing the 16-pin power connector melting issues. Igor found that one of his cables was constructed in such a way that important connectors could 'easily' fail, and he suggested cable makers crimp rather than solder the connector joints.

Igor’s reasoning was basically that soldering is less than ideal for any connector that may be subject to pressure, stress, or strain. Solder joints created without due care can be brittle, feature air bubbles, or introduce corrosive compounds to the wiring. Instead, manufacturers should use inherently flexible wiring plus crimped joins, which are said to be more amenable to flexing. However, Igor’s destructive testing of his cable didn’t produce the socket melting issue.

Then on Sunday, Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus (GN) published a video on this same topic. GN sought to do more extensive testing and tried very hard to replicate the melting socket using a selection of five cables from various sources, three powerful RTX 4090 graphics cards, and running for multiple hours at stock and overclocked (>600W) settings. GN even invested in new thermal imaging equipment to get to the bottom of this problem. Armed with a quintet of cables, a trio of GPUs, and thermal cameras and probes, the testing began.

In the course of its investigations, GN peeled back the adhesive strain-relief tape and exposed the area of the metal cabling / connectors inside the GPU power plugs. It did so carefully, “without damaging them.” Burke recalled that Igor’s investigations revealed the power and ground lines used 150V cabling, however, with all five adapters that GN had, they found all used component cables labeled as rated for 300V (14AWG, 105C).

Partners that GN spoke to indicated that the 300V cabling was on spec, which means Igor’s cable must have been under-spec. The specification requires 300V 14AWG for power delivery, though the four 'sensing wires' can use a lower gauge. There were other differences, for example where Igor said that removing the sleeve could cause underlying thin plate metal to “tear immediately,” no such problems were observed at GN. For some other important differences in Igor’s and GN’s cables, check the diagram below.

With the more substantial solder points, more evenly distributed power delivery, and 300V rated wires (they are labeled), GN was unable to reproduce any overheating issues, even though they tried various 'worst-case' connector destruction methods. Below you can see a chart showing that even the worst damage could only muster an 8C temperature increase around the connector area, and that was with up to eight hours of continuous stress testing.

In summary, even though it ran some of the highest power overclocked settings with quite severely damaged cables, GN didn’t experience any failures. There were no melting cables or sockets, no smoke, and no fire. Note that Igor’s testing didn’t show any melting either; he just theorized about how it might have happened. That's the problem with theorycrafting, GN notes in its video.

Surveys: 150V Wires Not so Common

With the revelations about differently soldered cables with different component wire (150 or 300V), both GN and Hardware Luxxe have reached out to readers on Twitter to gauge the mix of cables that have been shipped. According to GN, from 130 responses, just seven received adaptors using 150V rates cables — that's just 5.4% of all adapters surveyed so far. It appears most of these users purchased Zotac branded graphics cards.

The Hardware Luxx results were quite a bit worse on the whole. 79% of respondents received 16-pin adapters with 300V wiring. Note however that the 12VHPWR adapter thread currently only has 29 responses to the survey so far. Still, it's interesting that the percentage of 16AWG adapters on the surface appears to be much higher in Germany than in the U.S. based on site demographics.

Don't panic if you have an adapter with AWG16 150V wires. So far, we know of no correlation between the wire gauge and the incidence of connector melting. Still, given there are at least 15 'documented' cases of melted adapters at present, anyone with an RTX 4090 should exercise caution until Nvidia and its partners release an official statement as to what's going on. We suggest periodic checks to see if your adapter is getting particularly hot... or alternatively, just don't use an adapter (or the card) for the time being.

Tom’s Hardware’s Five Cables

We have tested five different RTX 4090 cards — one of which, the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix is now with our CPU reviewer, so we didn't check its adapter cable. All have come with what appears to be an identical adapter design, and pulling back the tape to check things out, they're all using 300V 14AWG wires.

These are likely from the same supplier as the samples Gamers Nexus checked, but we haven't gone any further with our dissection as we want to keep using the adapters and cards. The RTX 4090 cards we used for these adapters are the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X, Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC, and Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC.

Last week, EVGA announced it would be leaving the graphics card business — which came as a huge surprise and left everyone with a lot of questions about the brand's future. There's especially been a lot of discussion, on social media and in online forums, about what EVGA's decision means for the future of the premium Kingpin sub-brand, which was aimed at hardcore enthusiasts and overclockers. 

Vince "Kingpin" Lucido has made a statement about the EVGA bombshell, and has tacitly indicated he is open to offers. 

In a Facebook post to friends and fans, Lucido first thanked friends and colleagues in the industry before moving on to share some love for fans of EVGA Kingpin products. Lucido also made a statement regarding the future of Kingpin products:  

“If the KP hardware is meant to continue on in one way or another, I'm sure that it will [smiley face],” wrote Lucido. 

Reading between the lines, this suggests Lucido is interested in new hardware partnerships. If Kingpin hardware does continue, especially in the GPU sphere, there are some obvious contenders for collaboration. The big three — Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI — are all heavily involved in overclocking competitions and produce hardware tuned for overclocking feats. It's easy to imagine any of these brands partnering with Kingpin Cooling to create GPUs, motherboards, and maybe more. Of course, we might also see one of the lighter-weight contenders looking to use Kingpin's brand to raise its profile.

Digesting Friday’s Announcement

You may have been waiting for an official statement from EVGA about its decision to leave the GPU market, but the company didn't put out a press release. However, EVGA's Global Product Management Director Jacob Freeman posted on the official forums on Friday. Freeman provided the following concise summary:

• EVGA will not carry the next generation graphics cards.
• EVGA will continue to support the existing current generation products.
• EVGA will continue to provide the current generation products.

The above bullet points are direct quotes —  Freeman also emphasized that EVGA was very thankful to the “great community” that supported its graphics card products over the years.

If you're wondering why EVGA made its big decision so close to the GeForce RTX 40 series launch, we think it was probably thanks to an explosive mix of manufacturing economics combined with the weight of EVGA’s customer service commitments (extended warranty, step-up program, etc.) eating too deep into meager profit margins. 

YouTuber ScatterBencher has shown off some GPU-Z screenshots teasing impressive graphics card overclocking work in progress. The OC expert, known by the handle MassMan on HWBot, has coaxed the lethargic Intel Arc A380 graphics card into a sprightly 3.1 GHz performer. That clock speed represents a 55% uplift compared to stock and far exceeds factory overclocked samples.

The 3.1 GHz Intel Arc A380 tale raises quite a few questions. First, why overclock the Arc A380 to extremes? Probably just ‘because it is there,’ to coin a mountaineering phrase. The question of how is more involved, and we will have to take a few educated guesses, as ScatterBencher hasn’t divulged his technique for this feat.

ScatterBencher shared his results on Twitter, and bemoaned his techniques taking “2 steps forward, 1 step back.” Tuning GPUs is full of compromises and balances. Every GPU model and every individual GPU sample will have its optimal settings, which require steps forward and backward to pinpoint.

The screenshots show the 3.1 GHz overclock in the center section, reported by the sensors tab, as well as the HWInfo section. However, the same sections also provide the most significant clues to ScatterBencher’s methods. The reported board power draw of 17.4W is nonsensical. This leads us to believe that the overclocker has volt-modded the Arc A380 PCB, and sysmon tools thus misreport this stat. With the mod in effect, overclockers aren’t restricted by manufacturer-set power limits.

The feat ties in nicely with our report from mid-July, where an overclocking enthusiast showed impressive performance gains from giving the A380 an extra 43-57% of power. We concluded at the time that Arc A380 power limits were holding back its performance. It certainly looks like this little GPU loves eating watts, and can gain some worthwhile performance when it gets extra juice, but Intel’s designers want it at 75W stock - for market segmentation and similar practical reasons.

Hopefully, ScatterBencher and other GPU overclocking enthusiasts will reveal more about their methods. It would also be good to see what gaming performance uplifts a 3.1 GHz Arc A380 might deliver. Meanwhile, we look forward to Intel significantly expanding its Arc Alchemist lineup.

Have you ever wished for a better way to cool your uber-clocked CPU? A team of researchers with Microsoft and Georgia's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering did, and took the matter into their own hands by applying a microfluidic heatsink on Intel's well-beloved Core i7-8700K CPU (6-core, 12-thread Coffee Lake). Then they overclocked it for good measure! The result? They were able to cool up to 215W of power from a stock 95W TDP CPU using only room-temperature water, decreasing thermal resistance by a staggering 44.5% against the original heatsink cooling design (with liquid cooling).

The Core i7-8700K hasn't been at the top of our best CPUs for gaming list in quite some time, but it marked Intel's transition from requiring HEDT for more than four CPU cores to a more competitive mainstream platform. More critically, 215W of power draw in the small 149mm^2 die area represents a lot of thermal density. The Core i9-12900K by comparison has a 215mm^2 die size, with a 125W TDP and 241W PL1/PL2 rating. Going after the smaller chip while pushing similar power thus represents a more demanding cooling scenario.

Microfluidic cooling takes its name from micro-channels that are integrated into — or, in this case, added to — a chip's design. Water passes through these channels, which are isolated against the chip's transistors (usually on the back of the active circuitry), and cools them in a much more effective way than the traditional heatspreader approach. Heat flows upward from the transistors through a Thermal Interface Material (TIM, which can sometimes be metal-based) and through a CPU's heatsink. Only then is the heat taken away from the CPU by heating the contact plate on your air- or liquid-cooler of choice.

The researchers' microfluidic cooling design has the claim to fame of having been adapted to an off-the shelf CPU. To do so, they removed the CPU's heatspreader and TIM, transplanted into a specially-designed silicon carrier wafer, and then etched microfins directly onto the top silicon layer — the last frontier between the world and the active transistors underneath. They then inserted the chip and carrier wafer into the motherboard, and added another silicon layer on top of the microfinned CPU, etched with an entry and an exit port for the water itself. Finally, they 3D-printed the water-cooling delivery manifolds onto the top of this last layer.

The researchers then had to test their CPU - but not just at its stock frequencies. That would be too low a burden for the impressive cooling capability of their microfluidic implementation. The rest of their test setup looks pretty typical, making use of HWInfo for temperature and load analysis, while running the CPU in both stock and overclocked states under the popular Cinebench R20 and Prime95 workloads.

Within those workloads, the researchers achieved stable operating frequencies at up to 5.2 GHz for Cinebench R20 and 4.5 GHz for Prime95, a 40% and 21% increase respectively compared to the 8700K's rated base clock of 3.7 GHz. However, the 8700K would normally run at closer to 4.3 GHz on all cores, with overclocking to 4.8–5.0 GHz using liquid cooling. And let's just mention that it's highly unlikely the researchers are also part-time professional overclockers.

The researchers also tested the microfluidic cooling capability at different inlet temperatures, the water's temperature as it enters the microfluidic chamber. Their results show impressive cooling capabilities for all tested temperatures: 6 ºC, 21 ºC, 34 ºC, and 42 ºC. This means that this system can be implemented, with substantial improvements to operating temperatures, even in locations with high ambient temperatures.

Traditional cooling methods have worked until now, but we've been creeping toward the heat dissipation limits for a while. As chip manufacturing becomes increasingly denser, CPUs and GPUs alike require increasingly large amounts of electricity. In a bid to unleash more and more performance from smaller and smaller dies, we run the risk of the poor transistors cooking themselves to death even with the best off-the-shelf cooling solutions available today.

The researchers point out that server CPU and GPU power envelopes are expected to rise at a rate of 7% per year until 2030, with socket TDPs expected to reach the 400W mark in the 2030s. That might be conservative, as the Nvidia H100 already uses up to 700W.

And let's not even talk about true 3D chip design, which stacks transistors atop one another, increasing die area while packing them tighter together for further performance and power saving benefits. There's a reason AMD's latest posterchild CPU, the 5800X 3XD, shipped with locked overclocking. Heat dissipation issues were certainly one of the reasons the company elected to not launch a 12-core, 5900X equivalent with the added 3D V-Cache — despite the company having touted such a CPU back in the day. For those to be feasible with additional cores, and not just the comparatively low-power cache, these microfluidic cooling methods are certain to be necessary.

TSMC is investigating these cooling systems in a bid to integrate them directly onto their manufacturing capabilities. One day, you might have off-the-shelf CPUs that feature microfluidic chambers, and you'll just connect a liquid-cooling loop to the water intake and exhaust valves built onto the chips themselves.

The researcher's results are thus in line with industry developments, and point toward a more scalable, efficient cooling solution. When such systems are finally implemented (and we do believe it's a matter of when, not if), they can unlock higher power levels and more efficient compute systems, while minimizing the environmental impacts by reducing operating temperatures. That will have the knock-on effect of increasing energy efficiency.

There's another point in favor of these direct cooling systems: They're much more efficient than room-scale (or datacenter-scale) air cooling solutions, which tend to focus on cooling entire cubic meters of space for the sake of a much smaller chip footprint.

We look forward to the day when we can pick up one of these chips. For science.