A liquid nitrogen-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor has just set a new overclocking world record in the wPrime benchmark, beating the previous title holder, the Intel Core i9-7920X.

The feat was performed by Australian overclocker jordan.hyde99, who got the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X to reach speeds of 5,625 MHz to complete the tests in just 35 seconds and 517 milliseconds.

Usually, the Ryzen 9 3900X, which is based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture, runs at 3.8GHz, with a 4.6GHz boost.

This time beats the previous record, in which the Intel Core i9-7920X completed the test in 35 seconds 693 milliseconds.

Less is more

What’s interesting about these results, as Tom’s Hardware points out, is that the Intel Core i9 hit that record while overclocked to 5,955 MHz. That means the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X completed the benchmark faster – and gained the world record – while being overclocked at a lower clock speed.

Both the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and the Intel Core i9-7920X, which is based on Intel’s Skylake microarchitecture, are 12-core CPUs with 24 threads.

It seems like the AMD chip was able to get a better time with a lower clock speed thanks to the fact that AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture has higher instructions per cycle (IPC) is higher than Skylake.

The way AMD’s SMT (simultaneous multithreading) works compared to Intel’s Hyper-Threading tech could also be playing a part in the results.

Still, it’s yet another piece of good news for AMD on the CPU front.