Intel’s 18-core processor peaks above 6.1GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling

Intel’s new monster Core i9 processors boasting 18-cores and 16-cores have just gone on sale, and Asus has set some blistering new records overclocking these CPUs with its ROG Rampage VI Apex motherboard.

Using the Core i9-7980XE 18-core processor (with a base clock of 2.6GHz, Turbo to 4.2GHz) cooled with liquid nitrogen to around -100°C, expert ROG overclocker ‘der8auer’ managed to push the chip to 6.104GHz across all 18 cores (at 1.55V).

All without the CPU being reduced to a melted pile of goop, although the system wasn’t stable enough to run benchmarks at this speed.

To get some testing done, things had to be toned down to 5.6GHz with a voltage of 1.45V, at which point the multi-threaded Cinebench R15 benchmark could be run – Asus notes that there was almost 1000W coursing through the system.

The Cinebench R15 CPU score notched up was 5,635, a mind-boggling figure when you consider it almost doubled the previous record of 2,990 (another overclocker, ‘elmor’, pushed the chip even further to set a new record of 5,723).

New records were also achieved in 3DMark Vantage 2x with the CPU at 5.66GHz, with Italian overclocker ‘Rsannino’ achieving a score of 138,185 (compared to the previous record of 135,813).

He further blew away the Geekbench3 multi-core record – which stood at 48,004 – with a score of 92,307, again a massive leap.

Core i9 blimey

Furthermore, Rsannino clocked the Core i9-7940X (with 14-cores, base clock 3.1GHz) up to 5.7GHz, and again set a new Cinebench R15 record (4,339 compared to the previous 2,424) along with Geekbench3 multi-core (70,618 eclipsing the previous record of 40,155).

A load of other new highs were reached, and you can see the full list of benchmark records in this Asus article.

As ever, these sort of liquid nitrogen shenanigans are a far-cry from real-world overclocking and performance, but you can still gauge the relative power of Intel’s new monster processors in terms of how much they blew away the previous (equally super-cooled) records.

Of course, should you be tempted to invest in Intel’s flagship 18-core CPU, you’ll need deep pockets as it retails at $1,999 (about £1,480, AU$2,510), but it is exceptionally powerful, as these benchmarks illustrate – and as we found out in our full review.

However, it costs twice as much as AMD’s 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X.