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.
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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.