Celebrity overclocker Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch has overclocked the Core i9-13900K processor to 8.2 GHz under liquid nitrogen (LN2) at the finale of Intel's Creator Challenge. The flagship Raptor Lake chip, which will fight for a spot on the list of best CPUs, will hit the retail market on October 20 for $589.
The Core i9-13900K is a 24-core processor with eight P-cores and 16 E-cores. The chip has a maximum turbo boost clock of 5.8 GHz thanks to Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) technology. Splave pushed the Core i9-13900K to 8.2 GHz, a spectacular 41% increase over Intel's specification.
The Core i9-13900K shows huge overclocking potential— in contrast, the prior-gen Core i9-12900K only achieved 7.6 GHz. Therefore, the Core i9-13900K shattered the Core i9-12900K's record by 8%.
AMD's Zen 4 processors have their own merits as well. For example, we recently saw the Ryzen 9 7950X got up to 7.2 GHz on a single core and up to 6.5 GHz on all cores. However, according to HWBot, 7.4 GHz (7,471.96 MHz) is the highest that the Ryzen 9 7950X has reached. Therefore, the Core i9-13900K's clock speed is approximately 11% higher than the Ryzen 9 7950X.
It'll be interesting to see whether Raptor Lake can continue to conquer the overclocking charts. It's been a while since we've seen processors surpass the 8 GHz barrier. AMD's antiquated FX series of chips were notorious for hitting high clock speeds, and most of the HWBot submissions hail from the Bulldozer days. However, the FX-8370 still holds the record of the highest-clocked processor at 8.7 GHz (8,722.78 MHz), a feat from 2014.
While Intel and AMD continue to one-up each other in the overclocking game, consumers care more about out-of-the-box performance. So while the Core i9-13900K looks impressive under LN2, we'll soon see if it can overpower AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X when Raptor Lake launches on October 20.
