Pro Overclockers Waste No Time Setting Intel Core i9-9900K Overclocking Records North Of 7GHz

After weeks (or even months) of build-up, Intel has today launched its 9th-gen Core series, led by the eight-core, sixteen-thread Core i9-9900K. We took an in-depth look at Intel's latest hotness earlier, finding that overall, Intel's new mainstream top dog offers the strongest single-threaded performance going, as well as great multi-threaded performance.

On the topic of performance, it doesn't matter just how fast a new processor is, because it's never going to be fast enough for overclockers who want to achieve jaw-dropping benchmark scores. At Intel's launch event for the 9th-gen Core series a couple of weeks ago, the company had professional overclockers Joe “Steponz” Stepongzi and Allen “Splave” Golibersuch on hand to push the new octal-core CPU to the limits.

Intel says that an impressive 16 benchmark records have been set with the Core i9-9900K, and that all of the results will be uploaded to score database website HWBOT. Currently, the front page of the website does in fact highlight the i9-9900K's dominance in some categories, but interestingly, none of the results seen as of the time of writing here are associated with these two overclockers. Instead, all of them seem to belong to other Intel Core i9-9900K early adopters who are overclocking as well. 

So far, it seems that many pro-overclockers are finding out themselves that they're already reaching huge scores with the new CPU. Intel notes that at its Fall Desktop Launch event in NYC, at least 7.1GHz was reached, but HWBOT currently reports that the record is 7.613GHz, accomplished by der8auer.

As for everyone's favorite, Cinebench, the record currently belongs to Alex@ro who managed to hit 3,123 cb in the multi-core version of the test. To put that into perspective, that's almost as high as a stock-clocked Core i9-7980XE, a CPU with ten additional cores. Alex also owns the GeekBench 4 Core i9-9900K multi-core record, with a score of 9,819.

As the Intel Core i9-9900K has only just released, we're sure to see even more records broken over the next couple of weeks. And while those numbers roll in, we can thank Intel for finally adopting a better thermal interface solution for use under the chip's heatsink. The verdict is still out on how good the new sTIM (solder TIM) is in comparison to the old TIM, but it's clearly going to be better for overclocking than last-gen's parts.

If you want to keep up on the latest i9-9900K records, you can hit up this page.