Intel Core i7-7700K overclocked past 7GHz barrier

[Shawn Knight]

Intel has been seeding samples of its upcoming Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake desktop CPU to reviewers and professional hardware enthusiasts ahead of what’ll likely be an official unveiling at CES 2017. One such recipient, Allen “Splave” Golibersuch, recently shared good news on the overclocking front.

TechPowerUp reports that Splave managed to cross the 7GHz barrier using the aforementioned i7-7700K. Specifically, he was able to hit a benchmark-stable 7,022.96MHz (multiplier of 69x and a bus speed of 101.78MHz) using an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard.

That said, some concessions were made in order to achieve the milestone.

Splave had to disable HyperThreading as well as two of the processor’s four physical cores. The Vcore voltage, meanwhile, was pushed all the way up to 2.00V which meant liquid nitrogen had to be used for cooling.

That said, the chip reportedly completed PiFast in 9.02 seconds and zipped through SuperPi 32M in roughly four minutes and 20 seconds. When paired with an Asus GTX 1080 STRIX OC video card, the combo turned in a score of 643,316 in Aquamark and 86,798 in 3DMark 05.

Some will no doubt discredit the feat due to the fact that two cores were disabled and / or liquid nitrogen had to be used and that’s a fair argument. With NDAs set to lift any day now, most will be more interested in how the chip performs in an everyday setup with either air or basic liquid cooling.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/67547-intel-core-i7-7700k-overclocked-past-7ghz-barrier.html

 

[Kunming]

So you're saying all this R&D is really just so we can have 7Ghz Dual-cores?

 

[penn919]

So you're saying all this R&D is really just so we can have 7Ghz Dual-cores?

Well, quite a bit could be done with a 7Ghz Dual-core.

 

[Kunming]

Well, quite a bit could be done with a 7Ghz Dual-core.

Yeah, thank god they didn't start all this "multi-threaded" programs stuff early! I don't believe in it

 

[amstech]

If you can't leave all the cores and features on this "achievement" stands for nothing.
HT has been doing wonders for Windows OS and Gaming performance since 2009 and I wouldn't game without it on.

 

[penn919]

If you can't leave all the cores and features on this "achievement" stands for nothing.
HT has been doing wonders for Windows OS and Gaming performance since 2009 and I wouldn't game without it on.

Assuming you have a steady supply of liquid nitro, I think you'd discover some use cases that'd demonstrate the advantages. I mean...it is 7Ghz after all.

 

[PurpleYoda]

Aquamark??? 3DMark 05??? 8-/ Any reason why it was tested on 10 year old benchmarks running on DirectX 6 or something from 10.years ago? Any minute and we will learn the test was conducted in a stable Windows 3.1 environment... ;-D

 

[yRaz]

And I thought getting my 3770k to 5ghz was an accomplishment....

 

[Fulltone]

Who comes up with the lamest names? scaby lake?

 

[mjb12141963]

I am just a passer by, but why do they still keep them the same size? why don't they make them physically bigger. Wouldn't this give more capacity ?

 

[davislane1]

Always found these extreme overclocks to be an exercise in vanity. 7GHz would be great...if it were usable. But this type of thing is about as useful as stripping a Lamborghini down to the wheels and motor, putting a spoiler in front of the driver, and proclaiming, "Faster than a Bugatti!"

 

[psycros]

I am just a passer by, but why do they still keep them the same size? why don't they make them physically bigger. Wouldn't this give more capacity ?

The problem is that you've got to cram all that circuitry onto a motherboard that will fit into standard enclosures. That means that a CPU socket needs to be relatively small. You also can't stack cores due the intense heat produced - they need to all be on a single layer of silicon so cooling devices can do their jobs. Thus we're currently limited to the "wafer" design, which is easier to cool (and cheaper to manufacture). In the past, hardware designers have tried to employ multiple CPUs on the desktop by using daughterboards or simply having multiple sockets on the motherboard itself but that's really in the realm of servers. Sure, they COULD design an architecture for these multi-CPU systems that would be insane for gaming but very few of us would be able to afford it. Some dudes with the cash do opt for FX or Xeon server chips on their gaming rigs, and the results can be amazing but its not worth the extra $$ IMO.

 

[Kotters]

Always found these extreme overclocks to be an exercise in vanity. 7GHz would be great...if it were usable. But this type of thing is about as useful as stripping a Lamborghini down to the wheels and motor, putting a spoiler in front of the driver, and proclaiming, "Faster than a Bugatti!"

Why yes, they're a glorified World Record. No one is (or should) be claiming otherwise. That's the whole point of the exercise.

 

[Evernessince]

I guess this is the fruit of elongating your CPU cycles. Higher overclocks are possible by cherry picking the best processors and then the best cores on a processor. The very mature process means they will get high yields and high clocks.

Unfortunately that isn't really anything special given that Skylake reached 2 MHz shy of 7 GHz.

http://valid.x86.fr/records.html

If you look at Ivy Bridge and Haswell, both series surpassed the 7 GHz marker. It's really Intel just making up ground after the top overclock plummeted with Broadwell.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I'd rather see intel give us another 10% on IPC then get yet another chip up to 7 GHz with unrealistic hardware.

 

[mjb12141963]

If this is the first time 7GHz has been achieved what does it matter how it was done? just like a land speed record, if it was done it was done. Work to make it possible and affordable for the masses continues from there just like all new things that are desirable in our world. Computers, cars, watches, houses, phones. Just takes a while to make it marketable.

 

[Darth Shiv]

So you're saying all this R&D is really just so we can have 7Ghz Dual-cores?

Laws of physics bud. It's an exponential increase in difficulty.

 

[Darth Shiv]

I am just a passer by, but why do they still keep them the same size? why don't they make them physically bigger. Wouldn't this give more capacity ?

Because of the cost of silicon wafers and the inherent uncorrectable flaw rates per wafer. They want to produce chips of a certain cost. Silicon wafers cost so much. Smaller chips less likely to have flaws so better yields. The process shrinks don't fix silicon wafer flaws.

 

[Kunming]

Laws of physics bud. It's an exponential increase in difficulty.

I guess so. Well, at least we're lucky that Intel is being pushed really hard, nearly out of the market some analysts say, due to fierce competition from their rival, AMD. Luckily for us, it means CPUs have never been cheaper and performance improving by leaps and bounds every half year to a year.

 

[STbob]

These turds have way too much time on their hands. Why not disable all the cores and say you hit 100,000 GHz.

Liquid nitrogen lol. They spend more than worth of chip on cooling not to mention non mentioned rise in power draw and extra heat added to an already overheated room. I start to look at overlockers as dummies. Go mow the lawn or do something useful.

 

[yRaz]

Always found these extreme overclocks to be an exercise in vanity. 7GHz would be great...if it were usable. But this type of thing is about as useful as stripping a Lamborghini down to the wheels and motor, putting a spoiler in front of the driver, and proclaiming, "Faster than a Bugatti!"

I wouldn't go as far as saying it's vanity. These people are pushing the limits of what's currently technologically possible, who knows if these exotic cooling will prove useful in the future.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Laws of physics bud. It's an exponential increase in difficulty.

I guess so. Well, at least we're lucky that Intel is being pushed really hard, nearly out of the market some analysts say, due to fierce competition from their rival, AMD. Luckily for us, it means CPUs have never been cheaper and performance improving by leaps and bounds every half year to a year.

Source?

 

[captaincranky]

Yeah well, is this monster going to work with Windows 7, or does some back room "screw the end user ", dealing with M$ prevent that?

 

[captaincranky]

I wouldn't go as far as saying it's vanity. These people are pushing the limits of what's currently technologically possible, who knows if these exotic cooling will prove useful in the future.

Just think if this liquid nitrogen cooling hit the home power user set. Once a week or so, you'll need a pumper truck full of it delivering the stuff to your door.

While this may be hailed as a "great technological leap forward" for the hard core gaming set, it would set the rest of the world back going on a hundred years, before widespread mechanical refrigeration became available........Although I suppose, who isn't nostalgic to hear the "iceman, yo iceman" call, at the crack of dawn every Friday.

 

[STbob]

I wouldn't go as far as saying it's vanity. These people are pushing the limits of what's currently technologically possible, who knows if these exotic cooling will prove useful in the future.

No its vanity and almost a sickness. I know people that will build a computer for their dad using a cheap video card (like gt610) less than 10 gig/sec bandwidth that will be used for surfing and movies. The guy will secretly overclock dads video card which does nothing but add heat, draw more power and increase risk for instability with ZERO gain in anything his dad does. What do you call this? Its not vanity its insanity. They overclock when there is no reason to, they can't help it, its like an alcoholic, its a sickness to some. They would overclock a digital alarm clock to speed up time (in their mind)