What just happened? An overclocked AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X engineering sample in a custom liquid cooling loop managed to get over 100,000 points in the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark. It got extremely close to beating the world record held by a last-gen 3990X on liquid nitrogen.
YouTube overclocker SkatterBencher recently got ahold of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X engineering sample and went on to test its overclocking capabilities. This 64-core CPU is an unreleased Zen 3-based successor to the 3990X, offering only half the PCIe lanes and memory channels of the company's Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation processors.
As this is a TRX40-based processor, SkatterBencher used an Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard for testing and equipped it with an EKWB monoblock to water-cool both the CPU and VRMs on the board. He demonstrates several methods of overclocking this chip, including Precision Boost Overdrive (with and without Curve Optimizer) and per-CCX manual overclocking.
Ultimately, he got all 64 cores to run over 4 GHz concurrently, with the best CCX reaching 4.825 GHz during some benchmarks. With these settings, the processor got a staggering multi-core score of 100,191 in Cinebench R23, getting extremely close to the world record. For comparison, our i9-12900KS got around 29,000 points in the same test.
As you can imagine, the 5990X requires a lot of power to maintain such frequencies. In fact, during Cinebench, the motherboard reported a package power of almost 700W. Some CCDs were reaching over 90 degrees even though SkatterBencher used two massive radiators (1 x 480mm + 1 x 360mm) to cool just the CPU.
Threadripper Pro 5000 processors recently started shipping to consumers after being OEM exclusives for months. Some WRX80 motherboards will reportedly support both memory and CPU overclocking, so maybe someone can replicate SkatterBencher's success with a 5995WX in the future.