Overclockers Jon Sandström, Pieter Plaiser, and their team set the record at an Asus office in Taiwan earlier this month. Using an open-bench system with an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard, the Core i9-13900K, which has a maximum boost of 5.8GHz, was pushed to 9.009GHz. It was able to run Pifast for 6.85 seconds and SuperPi 32M for 3 minutes, 3 seconds, and 778 milliseconds. The team achieved its world record, which now tops the HWBOT charts, by disabling all of the Core i9-13900K’s Efficient cores and hyperthreading, leaving only the eight Performance cores and eight threads. Unsurprisingly, the chip reached its record-breaking speed using liquid nitrogen (LN2), though, in this instance, it was combined with liquid helium to bring the temperature first down to -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8 Fahrenheit) before pushing it to -250.2°C (-418.36 degrees Fahrenheit).
Back in October, the Core i9-13900K chip broke the overclocking world record by reaching 8.8GHz, moving ahead of the 8.7 GHz (8,722.78 MHz) reached by AMD’s FX-8370 that had been unbeaten for almost a decade. We called the Intel Core i9-13900K hot and hungry in our review of the current Raptor Lake flagship, awarding it a disappointing score of 75. It’ll certainly be interesting to see if the overclocking record will be broken again when the Intel Core i9-13900KS arrives next year. There’s expected to be a special edition version of the CPU that can reach 6GHz without requiring manual tuning.
The Intel Core i9-13900KS actually appears in the overclocking video—unlikely to be an accident on Intel’s part—in a CPU-Z listing where the product name is the Core i9-13900K, suggesting the KS version is a pre-binned model. As per VideoCardz, the chip is shown with a Max TDP of 150W, though this is just the Processor Base Power (PL1), so the Max Turbo Power (MTP/PL2) will likely be higher. For comparison, the Core i9-13900K has a base TDP of 125W and a max TDP of 253W.
