Intel Kaby Lake Potentially An Overclocker's Dream, Seen Breaking 7GHz With LN2

Russian website OCLab got hold of an upcoming Intel Core i7-7700K chip and decided to take it for an overclocking spin. Interestingly, the motherboard used is not of the upcoming series designed around Kaby Lake, but the chip was instead overclocked on a Z170 motherboard from ASRock (Z170M OC Formula, to be precise). That bodes well for those planning to snag a Kaby Lake CPU and would rather not have to upgrade their motherboard.

With liquid nitrogen cooling the processor, this particular chip peaked at just over 7GHz, which helped deliver a SuperPi 32M time of 4m 20s, and wPrime 1024M time of 1m 33s.

It's important to note that to hit this magical 7GHz, only 2 cores were left active, which is actually a bit surprising as it's not uncommon to see all but just one lone core left enabled with these massive overclocks. We can't help but wonder if we'd see even greater than 7GHz if: 1) Just one core was left enabled and 2) The chip was planted on one of the upcoming motherboards designed for Kaby Lake. Perhaps we'll see such feats at the upcoming CES 2017 show in Las Vegas? 

Either way, to see 7GHz before the release of the Core i7-7700K is awesome. Let's hope that the good OCing ability carries on through the rest of the lineup.