While awaiting customers are yet to have their maiden chance at toying around with Intel’s latest Core i7 chips, an unknown number of samples of the next-generation desktop flagship i7-7700K have been sent out to overclocking experts over the past several days. At least one of those sample chips, as new reports are suggesting, was overclocked past the 7.0 GHz threshold.
According to the folks over at TechPowerUp, it was professional overclocker Allen “Splave” Golibersuch who accomplished the 7+ GHz mark. The whole operation, including the duration of the peak performance, was reportedly bench stable. Although, there’s no doubt that it was somewhat edgy.
Apparently, Splave had disabled multiple key features including hyper threading in addition to two of i7’s four cores. The clock multiplier was cranked all the way up to 69x while the Vcore voltage was fixed at 2.0V.
For the uninitiated, this is not exactly the type of settings you would want to tune your brand spanking new Core i7 chip to — unless of course, you have the access to some serious aftermarket cooling, or a motherboard built to cope well with ‘edgy’ overclocking.
Splave also used liquid Nitrogen as a coolant to control the overwhelming heat dissipation under those settings.
As for the test results, Splave reached a peak clock speed of 7022.96 MHz. As for the test set up, the overclocker paired the Core i7-7700K with an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard. As said above, he fixed the Vcore voltage at 2V and used liquid nitrogen cooling. The chip crunched PiFast in just 9.02 seconds, SuperPi 32M in 460.25 seconds, wPrime 32M in 2.953 seconds wPrime 1024M in 1 minute 33.171 seconds.
Meanwhile, pairing up with the ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 STRIX OC graphics card led to a score of 86,798 points in 3DMark 05 and 643,316 points in Aquamark.