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Intel’s Raptor Lake flagship has applied another seriously impressive overclock, one that’s even faster than the leaked 8GHz performance we saw last month.
The difference this time is that this is an official overclock of the Core i9-13900K by an expert in the field, ‘Slave’ (Allen Golibersuch), who managed to run the CPU at 8.2GHz.
As Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) reports, this was part of Intel’s Creator Challenge and as you might imagine, Splave didn’t use traditional cooling, but rather liquid nitrogen (as is always the case, or similar exotic cooling that can’t be done at home, and is only good for a short period of use).
Splave managed to push Alder Lake’s equivalent, the 12900K, to 7.6GHz, so with this overclock to 8.2GHz, the Raptor Lake flagship is 8% faster even before it was released.
Analysis: A tempting proposition for speed demons on PC
So these are exciting times for PC tinkerers and enthusiasts. Raptor Lake’s overclocking potential is the strongest seen in ages for a range of Core processors, with the last time an Intel chip hit the 8GHz barrier over a decade ago.
The fastest in recent memory was the Core i9-10900K reaching 7.7 GHz, which is clearly well and truly beaten. The thing to remember is that after the 13900K is released, it will inevitably be pushed to greater heights. For example, the 12900K reached a top speed of 6.8GHz in its overclocking capabilities when it was first released, but that was later beaten by the aforementioned 7.6GHz.
So in theory, we could very well see the 13900K eventually burst into the 8.5GHz plus region by experts using liquid nitrogen. At that point, the CPU will challenge the fastest speeds ever achieved by a desktop processor (over 8.7GHz, and those very fastest chips are older models from AMD, it’s worth noting).
While the average PC owner will clearly not see such performance, it suggests that more normal overclocking – using liquid cooling perhaps, or a proper air cooler – will also yield impressive results. And indeed there has been a leak showing that the 13900K is supposedly running at a mighty 6.5GHz (on a single core) with a stock liquid cooling solution (add your own salt, maybe a few shakes here, as always with the rumor mill).
All signs point to a promising level of overclocking performance for Raptor Lake, which could be a powerful lure for enthusiasts, and a factor that could alarm AMD. The Zen 4’s new flagship, AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X, has hit 7.5GHz so far (again with liquid nitrogen), so the 13900K is almost 10% better than it at this point in the overclocking wars. A gap that will of course not be closed as time goes on…