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CPU-Wafer1

Intel is prepping the release of its new X299 platform and associated processors, and a new earth overclocking record shows the chips its releasing have some real teeth — with a few massive caveats, which we'll touch on shortly. At a contempo Gigabyte issue, overclockers were able to hit a whopping 7.5GHz with the Cadre i7-7740K*. That'south the upcoming Kaby Lake bit on Skylake-10's platform.

That wasn't all. The overclockers paired the board with Corsair DDR4-4333, a Corsair AX 1500i power supply, and Gigabyte'due south X299-SOC Champion motherboard. The CPU managed to set world records in 3DMark03, 3DMark06, and Aquamark, which is a flake like saying that a modernistic-day PC managed to fix CPU criterion records in the original Doom, Doom II, and Convulse. Granted, it'due south not quite that bad, but the reason a lot of these benchmarks use vastly older tests is virtually certainly because they respond to CPU clock gains particularly well. Nothing incorrect with that, but that's why you don't encounter more modern benchmark results.

The caveat, of course, is that it takes liquid helium, with its -250C temperature, to hit these kinds of targets. At that place'south a diminishing marginal return at the extreme stop of overclocking, where the corporeality of cooling you need to apply is inversely proportional to the gain from applying it. Lab501 did a comparison of the Core i7-4790K and the Pentium G3258 a few years back, to see how they would handle under overclocking pressure level.

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These are just test results for single CPUs, and then neither should be taken every bit existence the accented best (or worst) overclock you might feel with these parts. For our purposes, nevertheless, that's irrelevant. What matters is the temperature at which these overclock figures are beingness hit. Air, Air Xtreme, and water all-in-ane (also referred to as a closed loop liquid cooler, or CLLC) can't bring the CPU temperature below the ambient temperature of either the air in the room or the h2o in the liquid cooler. To exercise that, yous have to add below-ambience cooling to the organisation, and that'due south exactly what Lab501 did with its "h2o extreme" results. To quote the site:

How exercise nosotros get under 0 oC with a watercooling rig, you might enquire? Good question. Instead of using a radiator, nosotros will be using a regular solid thermal bag (the ones you employ when you go to a picnic to proceed your beer common cold) and in that we will put our thermal amanuensis, which is a mix of water, ice and antifreeze.

The mix of water with ice and antifreeze can become down to – 10 / – xx oC (depending on how much ice exercise you use) then we can talk virtually a showtime step into farthermost cooling. That besides means that we have to start thinking about insulation, considering condensation volition occur when we become downwardly bellow 0 oC.

When using an AIO libation, the load temp on the Pentium G3258 was 99C. Using dry ice, load temperature under identical circumstances was 10C. That's a huge shift in temperature for a relatively minor (one.16x) change in frequency. We can't compare the LN2 results, unfortunately, considering the site stopped running Prime95 and resorted to only testing Super Pi. This makes the last data bespeak in the graph invalid, considering it's fundamentally comparison a different scenario.

But the bespeak is fabricated — fifty-fifty if the LN2 data were accurate, the gains from using LN2 (and bringing the CPU temperature downwards equally low as -120C) are only 20 pct more than than the gains from the "Air Extreme" cooler. With -250C liquid helium and what were nigh certainly ideal-instance binned CPUs to drive the event, it's non surprising Intel and Gigabyte managed to smash overclocking records. But information technology's also not something that end-users can reasonably duplicate at habitation.

To make a long story short: Equally interesting every bit results like this are, they don't actually tell us very much about how fries will overclock in conventional systems or when using the equipment that normal overclockers are likely to use. The amount of energy yous accept to dump into the cooling arrangement to hit farthermost temperatures grows significantly as clock rates rise, from simple air cooling, all the way up to dry ice, LN2, and beyond.

Single-phase freon units are probably the highest-end equipment information technology's reasonable to deploy on a high-end CPU. Anything past that, and yous'll exist constantly calculation coolant to the system to keep the temperature depression. And all of this ignores that CPUs are fundamentally not designed to run at such low temperatures, or the high voltages required to break overclocking records. There's petty evidence that slapping a modest OC on a CPU meaningfully shortens its life, but the same can't exist said for the chips that go used at these overclocking events.

*–Note:  Nosotros reached out to Intel near whether or not the CPU Gigabyte tested should exist referred to as a 7740K or a 7740X. The 7740K branding on this chip means Gigabyte is using an technology sample for its examination results. The retail versions of the CPU will exist identified equally 7740X.