While eager customers still have to wait a little while to get their hands on Intel’s latest Core i7 chips, a few samples of the desktop i7-7700K have been sent out to overclocking professionals over the past few weeks. Using a sample chip, one professional overclocker managed to push the i7-7700K past the 7GHz threshold, and while the overclock was reportedly bench stable, it’s not exactly for the faint of heart.

According to TechPowerUp, professional overclocker Allen “Splave” Golibersuch pushed the i7-7700K past 7GHz by disabling some key features like hypthreading and two out of the i7’s four cores, cranking the clock multiplier to 69x, and pushing the Vcore voltage to 2.00V. For anyone unfamiliar with overclocking, let’s just say these aren’t exactly the kinds of settings you can hope to use without some serious aftermarket cooling and a motherboard designed for overclocking.

That said, it does appear that the 7022.96 MHz clock was relatively stable. It wasn’t the kind of clock you’d want to use every day, but for the purposes of pushing a chip as far as it can go, the overclocked Intel Core i7-7700K performed admirably.

Using an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard, and liquid nitrogen cooling, the 7GHz Core i7 was able to crunch wPrime’s 32M benchmark in just 2.953 seconds — that’s a benchmark that forces the processor to calculate the square root of 32 million numbers. Standard desktop processors are typically capable of doing so in under 10 seconds, but less than 3 seconds is pretty remarkable.

While other overclocking enthusiasts may have been underwhelmed by the overall performance of the Intel Core i7-7700K, in particular the incremental gains over Intel’s previous sixth-generation chips, it looks like Intel’s latest i7 chips might inspire more customers to try their hand at overclocking.

Editors' Recommendations