It hasn’t taken long for a team of overclocking savants from Asus to push the Intel Core i9-14700KF to a world record-breaking 9043.92MHz (9.04GHz). This breaks the previous record by just 35MHz, showing that, while the latest 14th gen CPU was able to make history, its record-setting status came down to the finest of margins.
We took a look a some of Intel‘s latest (and last) Core CPUs this week, including in an Intel Core i9-14900K review and Intel Core i5-14600K review. We deemed the i9-14900K to be among the best gaming CPUs on the market today, despite its astronomically high power consumption in some workloads.
As for the Intel Core i9-14900KF, it doesn’t have integrated graphics enabled but can still be overclocked, as its F and K markings denote, respectively. This makes it the better choice for Asus‘ team to push clock speed, as there is no need for the graphical transistors to be live. The record-breaking result was captured, in large part, thanks to liquid helium cooling, a much more effective, albeit expensive, alternative to liquid nitrogen.
As for their overall rig, it was an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard, a 1200W Enermax PSU, and 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z RAM.
This wasn’t a simple mission, however, as Tom’s Hardware reported that it took a whole week of testing to break the record. In some very exciting news for the future, the Asus team did at one point register a 9.1GHz result, but due to a lockup, the result couldn’t be deemed valid. It appears that there is still more to come from the 14th gen Raptor Lake refresh chip.
While the Intel Core i9-14900K is a contender for the best gaming CPU, it’s worth checking to see what the best graphics cards on the market are right now so you can dream about the perfect gaming setup for when you win the lottery.