Gigabyte's 8 GHz Alder Lake world record fiasco has finally come to an end. Doc TB, CPU-Z Validator's developer, has confirmed that CPU-Z has rejected Gigabyte's CPU-Z submission after the manufacturer failed to provide proof of the overclocking feat.
The CPU-Z team has been in contact with Gigabyte in an attempt to shed some light on the overclocking record. However, the company was unable to send over concrete evidence of how it allegedly pushed the Core i9-12900K to 8 GHz. According to Doc TB, the original submitter, which we suspect to be overclocking guru HiCookie since his name was on the submission, even admitted that he wasn't able to reproduce the 8 GHz result.
The developer behind CPU-Z previously detailed a theoretical bypass to take advantage of a silicon errata inside Alder Lake chips to fake clock speeds, despite Intel's 0x12 microcode fix. The team is aware of the workaround and is working diligently on a new CPU-Z revision to catch the funny people that exploit this bug,
Follow up. We decided to reject this entry from the CPU-Z Validator due to the extremely high probability of a bugged report. ⤵️ https://t.co/sdX9Lem3ZJNovember 9, 2021
Apparently, this wasn't Gigabyte or HiCookie's first rodeo. When AMD launched the Ryzen 5 5950X, Gigabyte was avidly promoting how its X570 Aorus Master motherboard had set a new world record with the Zen 3 chip reportedly at 6,362.16 MHz. The submission was rejected due to a known bug with Ryzen 5000 chips at launch. Doc TB utilized the new analysis algorithm on the CPU-Z submission and has confirmed that the 16-core processor was really running at 5,683.94 MHz. Guess who had submitted that dubious result to HWBot?
The CPU-Z team is cooking up a new algorithm to identify the bogus submissions from the real ones and will reprocess all the Alder Lake entries to remove the fakes. At the time of writing, the current record for the Core i9-12900K is at 7,543.95 MHz, achieved by overclocker Jon "Elmor" Sandström with liquid helium on Asus' ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboard. This puts an end to the overlocking soap opera, and Gigabyte would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for a meddling CPU-Z Validator developer.
