Congrats! AMD-sponsored overclocker Bill Alverson, aka Sampson, won the twin records of the highest scores in Cinebench R23 and R20 for 16-core CPUs on Friday with a Ryzen 9 7950X overclocked to 6.5 GHz. His scores now also rank 37th in R23 and 88th in R20 for CPUs of any size.

His score of 48,235 points in R23 is about 8,000 points ahead of second place --an i9-12900KS overclocked to 7 GHz also on LN2. It's about 11,000 points or 30 percent higher than the leaked scores of factory-clocked 7950Xs, and nearly 20,000 points higher than the regular scores of the 5950X.

The overclocked 7950X managed to leapfrog over the other 16-core CPUs and into the territory of 32-core behemoths like the Threadripper 3970X. It even outpaces Intel's 28-core Xeon W-3175X from a couple of years back, despite the overclocking race that processor prompted.

According to the screenshot submitted to HWBot, the overclock that won the R23 record was an x64.50 multiplier applied to the default 100 MHz bus frequency, resulting in 6450 MHz on all cores. It took 1.40 V and a peak power consumption of 271 W to reach it, 101 W more than the factory TDP.

The system was an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Gene motherboard paired with two 16 GB DDR5 sticks clocked at 3600 MHz. The GPU was the integrated AMD Raphael GPU based on RDNA2 clocked at 600 MHz. For the R20 record, Sampson rebuilt the system with an Asrock X670E Taichi motherboard.

The second overclock was reported quite differently by the hardware monitors. Benchmate recorded 6513.28 MHz, CPU-Z said 6538.38 MHz, and HWiNFO said that a 100.1 MHz bus frequency and an x64.63 multiplier resulted in an average clock speed of 6470.20 MHz.

Regardless, that was all he needed to score 18,605 points and take the 16-core CPU record in R20. For comparison, the highest 5950X and i9-12900K (LN2) scores are 15,664 points with an overclock of an even 6 GHz and 15,625 points with an overclock of 6873 MHz, respectively.

After the 7950X and the rest of the 7000-series launch on Tuesday, we should see more overclocking high scores appear (as well as our reviews!). Without exotic cooling, the CPU has a boost clock of 5.7 GHz and a base clock of 4.5 GHz, with an MRSP of $700.