We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Two overclockers have done ridiculous things to a Skylake i7 6700K CPU and achieved a world record 7GHz

Intel Skylake max overclock

Overclocking, at its highest level, is a funny world to get your head around. It’s a completely different endeavour than hopping into your BIOS and having a fiddle so that The Witcher 3 runs a bit smoother. Practicality goes out of the window – it’s all about numbers. So when I say that German overclocking duo Der8auer and Dancop managed to get an i7 6700K running at 7007.85MHz, you know they went to some pretty extreme measures to achieve it.  

Looking for some hardware you can’t break (and don’t need to place in a block of ice to make it work better?) You’ll like our best PC gaming mouse feature.

Firstly, the pair just binned a bunch of CPUs, looking for thecrème de la crème among Intel’s batch of Core i7 6700K chips – the most powerful desktop processor in the Skylake range. If a chip could run at 4.8GHz on an air cooler, it made the grade. If not – get in the bin.

Asus would probably really like you to know that they did all this using their own Maximus VIII Extreme motherboard. It’s a pretty good endorsement, given that the overclockers in question obviously set such a high bar for their feat.

Next job was to reduce the operating temperature. And I mean really reduce it – right down to -190 degrees celcius. Core voltage was also increased to an eye-watering 2.064V. I really wouldn’t recommend trying that.

Just a single core was enabled in the BIOS, with a 69x multiplier applied to it at a base clock of 101.56MHz. The resultant 7007.85MHz overclock is a new world record (verified here), breaking previous holderChi-Kui Lam’s6998.88 MHz.

Cheers, Techfrag.