Skylake Breaks 7GHz In Intel Overclocking World Record

Intel's latest generation of processors built on the Skylake architecture are seriously efficient as well as seriously fast. The flagship, Core i7-6700K, is an interesting chip as it's clocked at a base 4GHz, and can peak at 4.2GHz with Turbo Boost. Overall, it's a really solid chip, as we discovered back in November after some in-depth testing.

Of course, as fast as the 6700K is, overclocking can always help take things to the next level, or at least temporarily explore future potential. In Chi-Kui Lam's case, he did just that, and managed to break a world record in the process.

Chi-Kui Lam's record-breaking Intel platform

Equipped with an ASRock motherboard, G.SKILL memory, and a beefy 1.3KW Antec power supply - not to mention liquid nitrogen - Lam managed to break through the 7GHz barrier to settle in at 7025.66MHz. We're not sure of what temperatures the chip had to be taken to, to achieve this ridiculous clock speed, but a CPU-Z screenshot shows us that all cores but one were disabled - something traditionally done to improve the chances of reaching such high clock speeds.

As impressive as 7GHz is, it's not the highest frequency we've ever seen. Over at HWBOT, we can see that the overall world record belongs to The Stilt, who pushed an AMD FX-8370 to a ridiculous 8,722.78MHz. And interestingly, that didn't require the disabling of cores as all 8 were left functional. Back in October of 2013, WYTIWX submitted a result of 8,543.71MHz with his Intel Celeron 352.

Given how long Intel's Skylake has been available, it seems very unlikely that we'll see records far beyond 7GHz, unless a new revision comes along, but one thing's for certain: pro overclockers are not going to stop trying.