8 GHz Core i9-14900K Sets New Record in CS2 With 1,310 FPS

Core i9-14900K
Core i9-14900K (Image credit: Channel Kbit/YouTube)

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.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Ravestein NL
    These CPU's are extremely powerhungry. I rather see a performance per watt number than frequency only,
    Reply
  • ManDaddio
    Ravestein NL said:
    These CPU's are extremely powerhungry. I rather see a performance per watt number than frequency only,
    That is kind of silly to say as that has nothing to do with overclocking. Also, tech tubers don't use real world scenarios except maybe gaming under very clean scenarios.
    For instance, my old 9900k was also called power hungry and hot by tech tubers. Mine runs all cores @5ghz never goes above 70 degrees and uses a very tolerant amount of power. In fact someone just a few months ago didn't believe me. I showed him and he still didn't believe me. Sometimes you just have to learn to play with bios settings to get better numbers. I'm no expert but know enough.
    Each CPU is different though.
    Same with my 13700k. I can set my power limit to whatever I want and still get great performance. Most motherboards have the power limit set to very high numbers which the motherboard will use if it can.
    But if I set a power limit on a good motherboard and still tell it to run all cores @5.3ghz it will try to do just that with lower power.
    Why they don't do that to begin with I don't know. Also if sitting idle the power usage goes way down unless you set it not to.
    Therefore, all this talk about power is blown out of proportion a little. It is real but not how the tech media makes it sound.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    Ravestein NL said:
    These CPU's are extremely powerhungry. I rather see a performance per watt number than frequency only,
    This was an overclocking event with the priority of max clocks over anything else.
    But if you wanted performance per watt you need to be more specific.
    These CPUs can be very efficient at 60 fps gaming if you tune them. I bet they wouldn't even use 30 watts.
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    Team.AU's feat represents a 33% overclock
    Remember when you could get a 50% overclock on air? Pepperidge farms remembers...
    Reply
  • washabletrain
    Fortune was smelling on them
    That made me chuckle a bit. Fortune is a creep smelling people.
    Reply
  • Dementoss
    No indication of game settings used, including resolution. Rather pointless...
    Reply
  • daredevil01
    8GHz OC? I'd be curious to see how this nuclear reactor compares to the X3D in gaming at that speed, maybe that can be Raptor Laker ++ ?
    Reply
  • daredevil01
    In all seriousness, I was waiting for these to release before speccing my system. I think I'll wait a little longer to see what AMD's next chips will bring.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    I may have missed the mention in the article, but at what resolution and settings did they achieve 1310 fps?
    Reply
  • bill001g
    Order 66 said:
    I may have missed the mention in the article, but at what resolution and settings did they achieve 1310 fps?
    Likely 1080 low where all the so called "pro" players living in moms basement set theirs so they can imagine seeing frame their monitor can't even display.
    Reply