A new leak suggests that AMD Ryzen chips will overclock to 5GHz on air. This comes from CPCHardware, short for Canard PC Hardware, a well-known French PC magazine which recently published the AMD Ryzen review before the NDA lifted.

The magazine revealed the real-world performance benchmarks as well as power draw of AMD’s upcoming CPU based on their next-generation Zen architecture. If you’re interested, you can read more about the review here.

AMD Ryzen Easter Egg Hidden on CPCHardware: [email protected]=5G

Today, another interesting bit of information comes out of CPCHardware’s Ryzen feature. Apparently, an easter egg hidden on page 10 of the digital magazine confirms that AMD Ryzen CPU will be able to achieve overclocks of at least 5GHz on air.

On top of the magazine’s Ryzen feature, there is a cryptic string of binary code which is as follows:

010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111

When you put this string in a binary to plain text converter, this is what it says: [email protected]=5G.

If you don’t know, the review was conducted using an early engineering sample of Ryzen featuring an all-core turbo of 3.3GHz and a base clock speed of 3.15GHz. So we’re not even talking about the retail version here which will come with a base clock of 3.4GHz+, according to AMD.

That being said, we don’t know details about the test bench and settings under which the Ryzen CPU hit the 5GHz mark. Also, there are no details regarding the number of cores the Ryzen ES had. Nevertheless, this seems like a good news for the upcoming Ryzen chips.

AMD Ryzen Performance, Price and Release Date

The early benchmark results for Ryzen pretty much fall in line with what AMD commented about the upcoming processor at the New Horizon event. Built using the 14nm FinFET process, the Ryzen CPU is up to 60% faster than the previous-gen 8-core AMD FX-8370 in rendering benchmarks.

It offers roughly 32% performance boost over the FX-8370 in games, but falls short of Intel’s i5 CPU which can be explained by the low clock speed of the sample. With the retail version of the Ryzen, we can expect around 8% increase in performance, which means it will still be slower than the Core i7-6900K by at least 6%.

Even so, the performance is no less than impressive when we consider the new 8-core / 16-thread processor could be 2-3 times as cheap as Intel’s $1000 6900K solution.

AMD Ryzen processors for desktops are on track to be released in Q1 2017, around February – March, but you should expect more details on pricing and Zen based SKUs to come at CES 2017 which is only a week away.