Breakthrough overclocking record: Raptor Lake achieves 9 GHz

Sixteen years since first 8+ GHz overclock, a CPU has reached 9.0 GHz under extreme liquid helium cooling

Intel’s Raptor Lake processors brought one surprise: breaking the absolute extreme OC record. There were doubts it would ever happen, as today’s CPU architectures are not optimized for the high clock speeds at all costs like the past record holders Pentium 4 and AMD FX. But Raptor Lake and Intel 7 Ultra manufacturing process have shown they are capable of even more and have conquered a milestone never-beaten before, now.

Back when the news of the first world record breaking – which only took 8812.85 MHz to do – arrived, we speculated that Raptor Lake could, with a bit of luck, manage even higher results. In fact, there was immediately the question whether this silicon might not be the first processor to reach the magical 9 GHz threshold. That’s a clock speed no processor had ever run at before.

And it turns out that the same overclocker with the nickname Elmor (Jon Sandström), who also achieved the first Raptor Lake world record, really did it again. This result is also the work of Asus that sponsors the team, and was using its ROG Maximus Z790 Apex board with G-Skill Trident Z memory.
Early reports said the record was set with the upcoming Core i9-13900KS, which would show the capabilities of the specially binned silicon that will power the special edition CPU. But according to the HWBOT database entries (and a video interview with Elmor), the record-breaking chip was still an Core i9-13900K. In the video, you can see a Core i9-13900KS lying around as well, so maybe its sample was also evaluated, but the 9GHz record wasn’t broken with it.

Achieving this world record was a bit more of a “high-tech” event (and also more expensive) because it was not liquid nitrogen cooling that was used, but rather liquid helium. The liquefied rare gas was being injected into an Elmor Labs Volcano cooling container (unlike nitrogen, it can’t just be poured into a container). Helium is more expensive and a lot more complicated to work with, but thanks to its lower melting point it can get the chip to temperatures many tens of degrees cooler than liquid nitrogen. The temperature of the chip can go as low as minus 260 degrees (the temperature at the record was reportedly minus 250.2 °C). You can see what the event looked like in a video from SkatterBencher.

The new world record is now 9008.82 MHz after this achievement. This is not a record for overclocking the whole processor, but only one large core (P-Core), which was probably pre-selected as the most capable in terms of OC.

CPU-Z snip for the record attempt. The clock speed was like this for just a few seconds (source: CPU-Z Validator)

Red button?

It wasn’t easy to get this record. The system would not boot and run at over 9 GHz the entire time it was booted, that clock speed was only deployed for about one or two seconds. The ROG Maximus Z790 Apex board has a feature where it boots at a lower, safe clock speed (800 MHz according to the video), which it then switches to the extreme clock speed set for the record attempt on demand. Elmor uses a special button (red…) to switch to this mode, and it seems that the timing with this was really tight, and the extreme clock speed was really there for just long enough to run the benchmark and validation.

During the experiment, the Asus team also reportedly came close to using up all the 100 litres of helium they had prepared, which was enough for about one hour of experiments, and the record was validated for the HWBOT database almost at the last minute. Three prepared system were gradually tried, since the first board using the Core i9-13900K from the previous record stopped working in the extreme cold. But the two backup processors had no success. The second failed to boot at such a low temperature and the third sample failed to reach such high clock speeds.

For the last attempt, they managed to get the first build back up and running, and managed several attempts that achieved clock speeds of 8997, 9008 and 9015 MHz for the second or so it took to click the Validate button in CPU-Z and save the result. Of these, only the middle validation was eventually accepted, leaving the record at 9008.82 MHz. The 9GHz notch was thus achieved with the same processor that won the previous record of 8812 MHz under liquid nitrogen.

HWBOT’s chart shows how long it has taken to break the 9 GHz barrier since reaching 8 GHz back in 2007 (source: HWBOT.org)

The trick of activating the peak clock speed for just a few seconds is probably also intended to preserve the lifetime of the exceptional processor sample that was used. But it does show how this clock speed, even for a very short period of time, balances on the edge of the processor barely functioning and of what is physically possible.

The lab during extreme overclocking, when a clock speed of 9008 MHz was reached on the Core i9-13900K. The build in the foreground is not the record-breaking one, but the second of the two backup systems (source: HWBOT.org)

For a successful benchmark, the maximum is much lower

To illustrate just how “practical” the clock speeds are in these record attempts: after reaching 9 GHz, the team still tried to set new records in SuperPi 1M (3.822 seconds) and PiFast (6.85 seconds) with the helium leftovers. Here, the processor had to pass a benchmark that still only fully utilizes one core and only for a few seconds, but even this already requires a much higher level of stability than what is exhibited at the peak frequency OC attempts. These benchmarks could only be successfully run at 8.44 GHz (with a temperature of around 220 degrees).

Sources: CPU-Z Validator, SkatterBencher, Intel, Asus, HWBOT

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš


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