Gigabyte managed to push an Intel Core i7-7740K to a record-breaking 7.5 GHz speed

By Mark Coppock June 7, 2017

intel — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Intel has responded to AMD’s highly competitive Ryzen CPU line with lower prices on some Core processors and an aggressive rollout of its own high-end chips. The X299 chipset and Core-X series of CPUs are the latest Intel response to the sudden increase in competition in the company’s most important market.

PC component maker Gigabyte has a vested interest in knowing exactly how well all of these new processors and chipsets perform. One way of accomplishing that objective is to push them to their limits, which is exactly what it did with the Intel Core i7-7740K in a recent record-setting overclocking session, according to The Tech Report.

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Gigabyte has its own overclocking experts on staff, including the one known as HiCookie, who has his own team of five overclockers. This group put the Core i7-7740K to the test running on Gigabyte’s X299-SOC Champion motherboard, and used some fairly aggressive cooling techniques.

Specifically, liquid helium at -220 degrees C was paired with a Corsair AX 1500i power supply. The team also used 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-4333MHz memory for the CPU test, as well as G.Skill Trident Z 3600C17 RAM and dual Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs for the 3DMark tests.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The results were impressive. First, the team managed to overclock the CPU to a staggering 7.5 GHz, which is a record-setting speed. The 3DMark results also set new records, scoring 356,678 points in 3DMark03, 71,928 points in 3DMark06 with a single GTX 1080 Ti, and 71,176 points in 3DMark06 with two GTX 1080 Ti cards.

These are some impressive results for sure, and demonstrate that Intel remains firmly ensconced in the high-end of the CPU market. AMD has yet to release its full line of new CPUs based on the Zen architecture that includes the 16-core Threadripper, and Intel itself has its own even more aggressive Core-X processors on the way. Combine those with with AMD’s upcoming Vega architecture of GPUs, and it’s clear that PC performance has significant room for growth.

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