Overclocker breaks 8GHz barrier with Core i9-12900K and clocks DDR5 at 8300MT/s

Taiwanese overclocker Hicookie overclocked an Intel Core i9-12900K processor to 8GHz on a single core. With the Core i9-10900K and i9-11900K, that barrier has never been broken; those 14nm processors were stuck at 7.7 and 7.3GHz.

To reach the clock speed of 8000MHz, the Vcore has been significantly boosted and set to 1,812 volts, according to screenshots provided by the Spanish Aorus division of Gigabyte. have been put on Twitter. It is almost certain that this is an extreme overclocking attempt using liquid nitrogen to counteract the heat build-up. Such an overclock is not intended to run stably, but it must be able to boot and start Windows to take a CPU-Z screenshot.

The Core i9-12900K is the new top model from Intel and the processor is available from Thursday. Reviews of the Alder Lake processors will also appear online on that day. The processors are made on the Intel 7 process. By default, i9-12900K has a maximum clock speed of 5.2GHz.

Similar overclocking attempts have been made in recent years with the Core i9-10900K and i9-11900K. The former Comet Lake processor reached a maximum of 7.7GHz and the newer Rocket Lake variant remained stuck at 7.3GHz. Those processors were still made at 14nm. These attempts also concern the maximum overclock of one core.

It is obvious that the clock speed of 8GHz will be increased a bit further with more overclocking attempts with the Alder Lake processors in the coming time. However, according to HWBot, the world record for clock frequency has been set at more than 8.7GHz with an AMD FX-8370 processor for years. New Intel processors are unlikely to break that record.

Apart from the CPU overclock, Hicookie has also managed to significantly increase the speed of DDR5 memory. He clocked a 16GB set of DDR5-4800 at 4149.8MHz, good for a speed of 8300MT/s. He used timings of 52-52-52-100-127-2.