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We’ve come to expect pretty impressive stats out of any Intel processor with an ‘i7’ tag on it, but Gigabyte seems to have surpass all of that with its world record-breaking overclocking. Using liquid helium, the manufacturer and distributor managed to overclock an Intel Core i7-7740K to a spectacular 7.5GHz.
Working with Intel’s new Core X-Series chips that were announced at Computex, a team of overclockers lead by Gigabyte’s HiCookie used the firm’s own X299-SOC Champion motherboard to break the record. The liquid helium cooling chilled everything down to minus 250 degrees Celsius which allowed the processor to hit the full 7.5GHz.
With a different experiment, the team also posted a new world record for the 3DMark06 benchmark, with the CPU running at 7.1GHz (this time with liquid nitrogen cooling) and working with an Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition graphics card. They managed to hit a score of 71,928 (over 1,000 points ahead of the previous record). Using a pair of GTC 1080 Ti cards in SLI, the team achieved a further record of 71,176.
As if that wasn’t enough, the team also set a new Aquamark record of 737,222 by using a pair of Nvidia GTX 980 Ti GPUs, along with a 3DMark03 record of 356,678 with one GTX 1080 Ti. All of this is with the CPU at 7.1GHz.
A new Aquamark record was also set (737,222 – using a pair of GTX 980 Ti graphics cards) and a new 3DMark03 high score as well (356,678 using a single GTX 1080 Ti), again with the CPU at 7.1GHz.
While obviously your average PC user isn’t going to be cooling their rig to minus 250 degrees Celsius (just so you know, the coldest temperature ever recorded is minus 94.7 degrees celsius in Antarctica), these are undoubtedly impressive achievements that show the potential of Intel’s new processors. And this isn’t even the most powerful one. That honour is reserved for the ostentatious 18-core i9 model.
What will be more interesting is seeing how the chips actually work in a real world setting and how consumers react to them.
