Core i9-14900KS cooled by LN2 on an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore
An experienced group of extreme overclockers gathered around Intel’s latest and most powerful desktop processor (Core i9-14900KS) and managed to do unprecedented things. Namely, to reach over 9 GHz on the cores of this processor. That’s a high enough clock speed to break several world records in terms of speed measurements. In this short report, you will find what exactly was achieved.
The release of the Intel Core i9-14900KS was accompanied by an event that was supposed to give this processor (quite) a bit of a push. A team around the overclocker Elmor armed themselves with 600 litres of liquid nitrogen, 100 litres of liquid helium and a Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard.
The Apex series of boards is functionally oriented primarily towards extreme CPU overclocking, and the CPU core clock speed (with the Core i9-14900KS) topped out at 9117.75 MHz this time around. That’s with a Vcore of 1.85 V at a cooling medium temperature of -230 °C. This is an all-core boost on all cores, but at the same time with the E cores deactivated.
For the eight P cores without HT, the enthusiast Safedisk has already measured 6.79 seconds in PiFast, 3.768 seconds in SuperPI (1M) and finally 97.596 seconds in PYPrime (32B). So it’s not just that the Core i9-14900KS passed the CPU-Z validation at such a high frequency, but it was also stable enough to compute longer, more demanding math tests.
Although you won’t get anywhere close to similar results in normal operation, as extremely sub-zero coolant is necessary, in a way it speaks volumes about the vast over-dimensioning of Asus’ top-of-the-line motherboards. And, of course, not just those. Similar results will be achieved on competing motherboards as well, but no one has verified this with the Core i9-14900KS yet. On the Asus Apex motherboard, there is already some history of results with older processors. The 9 GHz threshold has also been surpassed with the Core i9-13900K, and with the Core i9-14900KF the archived clock speed is again exactly 9043.92 MHz.
You can see what it looks like at such a gathering of extreme overclocking enthusiasts in this video of the “torturing” of the Intel Core i9-14900KS.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš