Intel's Kaby Lake Breaks The 7 GHz Barrier Using A Liquid Nitrogen Setup

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Intel's processors have been known to perform exceptionally well in the enthusiast segment and their performance have broken several records. The chip-giant has released several processors with "K" moniker and they come with an unlocked multiplier. In layman terms, it essentially means that the chip can be pushed to its limits provided you have the sufficient cooling setup.

Intel has released its Kaby Lake series of processors which are manufactured using the 14nm process technology promising faster CPU clocks, higher Turbo frequencies and better graphics performance compared to the previous gen chips from Intel, PCMag reported. The top-end performer of this series is the Core i7-7700K clocking at 4.2GHz for the base frequency and 4.5 GHz when the Turbo mode kicks in. The processors are still not released for general public but samples were given out by Intel to reviewers and enthusiasts.

As reported by HotHardware, a Russian website OCLab got their hands on a Core i7-7700K chip and decided to overclock it. A professional overclocker with the name of Allen "Splave" Golibersuch pushed the chip to its limits and reached "dream" clock speeds of 7Ghz. However, to reach the speeds they had to disable several features like Hyperthreading and also disabled two cores of the quad-core processor.

Also, they increased the multiplier to 69x and Vcore was increased to 2.0V. These are insane numbers and only a powerful processor with a highly efficient cooling setup can bear these voltage numbers. In this case, liquid Nitrogen cooling setup was used to cool down the processor. The motherboard was also a contributor to achieve these kinds of speeds and ASRock Z170OC formula performed exceptionally in this scenario.

The overclock was relatively stable at 7022.96 MHz as the setup was able to complete wPrime's 32M benchmark in just 2.953 seconds while an average desktop processor takes around 10 seconds to complete the same benchmark. So, this overclocking test gives us an idea of what to expect from Intel's upcoming series of Kaby Lake processors.