The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, 9950X, and Zen 5 chips were only launched yesterday and it appears that some users have already pushed them to their limits. These are some of the most powerful CPUs on the market, if not the best for gaming. It's no wonder they can clock high speeds when the pressure is on.
MSI (via Wccftech), pointed out that a new world record clock speed was set for the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This appears to be referring overclocker TSAIK’s recorded clock speeds, which were 7.4 GHz on the 12-core 9900X compared to 7.44 GHz on the 16-core9950X. These clock speeds were submitted to the overclocking score aggregator website HWBot. For reference, both chips' stock boost clock is 5.6GHz, which is 2GHz higher than the respective base clocks.
The 9950X is the big score. This 7.44 GHz is almost the same as the highest frequency that I could find on HWBot, which was 7.47 GHz for the previous-gen AMD Ryzen 7950X. This was achieved by overclocker rogfisher. It's impressive that these chips have only been available for a day and are already approaching the previous-gen record.
This score is not even close to the highest frequencies that has achieved. Last year, Asus, for example, broke the clock speed record with the Intel Core i914900KF. But, yea, apples and oranges. Who wants to push Intel chips beyond default settings, especially with the instability issues that exist even at previous defaults?
These AMD chip overclocks were not achieved with a standard cooling system. As with any extreme overclocking, the chips were cooled by liquid nitrogen. I've heard that this is a tricky thing to get right. It's important to waterproof everything, and if the chip is cooled too quickly, it can crack. This is not for the faint-hearted.
It's nice to see that the chips can achieve these speeds when needed. It's not surprising, given Zen 5 architecture improvements that improve power and heat efficiency.
It's good to see how Zen 5 chips perform when pushed, given that AMD Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 are shipping in a mode that looks, for all practical purposes, like an eco mode. It's so much that AMD is rumoured to give these midrange chips an increase in TDP after launch.
It's a shame, however, that the 9900X & 9950X are currently the most expensive models available, at least in the short term. Let's hope that prices will drop soon. My money is on some price cuts when Intel Arrow Lake processors launch.
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