He Pours Liquid Nitrogen On An Intel Skylake CPU At IDF. What Happens Next Is Astonishing!

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 19, 2015, 11:09 AM EDT

Intel has been discussing gaming and overclocking quite a bit at this year’s Intel Developers Forum, in large part because its latest 6th Generation Core processors, formerly codenamed Skylake, are such good overclockers.

Oh, and apologies for the clickbait headline. We couldn’t resist. Hey, at least you're not looking at our coverage on "how to get ripped."

Not only have the early Skylake-based processors currently in the wild hit relatively high frequencies already, but they are more flexible overclockers than previous-gen products as well. Unlike every Intel processor since Sandy Bridge was released, Skylake-based processors can be overclocked using both multiplier and BCLK frequency manipulation, with fine grained controls. The BCLK on the last few generations of Intel desktop processors could only handle a few MHz in either direction, depending on which strap was used, before things went sideways.

XTU World Records--We Summon Thee! And 5.81GHz of hellfire...

To further prove the point that Skylake-based processors are excellent overclockers, Intel brought Charles Wirth of XtremeSystems fame onto the stage during a Gaming Mega-Session at IDF to super-cool a Core i7-6700K and push its frequency as high as possible. Wirth and his teammates cooled the processor down to sub-zero temperatures with liquid nitrogen and were able to hit a stable 5.81GHz on all cores.

While the processor was overclocked, they ran Intel’s XTU utility and hit a score of 1910, which was a new record. The previous record with four processor cores was 1908.

Intel Core i7-6700K Overclocked To Over 5.8GHz

Considering how new Skylake is to the market, seeing numbers this high, this early, are encouraging. As Intel continues to tune Skylake, and motherboard makers and overclockers get more familiar with the intricacies associated with the architecture, expect significantly higher frequencies to be achieved and more records to be broken.

Tags: Intel, Overclocking, Skylake, idf2015

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com

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