Intel Core i7-9700K spotted overclocking past 5.5GHz across all eight cores

Intel Coffee Lake Refresh processors are still a ways off from their rumored October release, but apparently users are already overclocking engineering samples, according to this latest leak.

The Intel Core i7-9700K was purportedly spotted overclocking at 5.5537GHz across all eight cores by ZOL. The Intel Core i7-9700K is thus far rumored to be an 8-core and 8-thread part, which normally operates between 3.6GHz to 4.6GHz, and boosts up to 4.9GHz with single-core Turbo Boost 3 – so this supposed overclock frequency is well above the norm.

While the processor was in this overclocked state, the unnamed users also benchmarked the chip with Cinebench R15 and the processor delivered a single-core result of 250cb and multi-core result of 1,827cb.

Comparatively, the Intel Core i7-8700K delivered 193cb and 1,408 scores in the same respective single- and multi-core tests. Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X gave us a 177cb result in single-core and 1,798cb in multi-core.

From all of this, we can see the greatest improvement the 9700K will supposedly bring while overclocked is single-core performance. However, we’re a bit worried the multi-core performance at such a high frequency is just barely ahead of a Ryzen 7 2700X operating normally.

The post on ZOL also details the chip was tested on an ASRock Z370 Professional Gaming motherboard and G.Skill DDR4-2133 RAM – so this is far from an ideal testing situation. We’d likely get even better performance with faster memory and Intel’s rumored (and basically confirmed) Z390 platform.