Intel only just revealed its beefy Core i7-8086K back at the start of the week at Computex 2018, yet the anniversary edition processor has already been overclocked by an expert to hit a speed of 7.24GHz across all six of its cores.
This was achieved by Der8auer (a big name in the world of overclocking) over at Computex, using the usual liquid nitrogen cooling method (chilling the chip to negative 185 degrees Celsius) to prevent the CPU from overheating or melting into an unidentifiable lump of silicon.
Silicon lottery
Part of getting a record overclock is about finding a top-performing chip, as they all have slight variances (whether you get a good one with higher tolerances for overclocking is referred to as the ‘silicon lottery’), and Der8auer had a much bigger selection of 8700K CPUs to work with when he clocked up 7.3GHz.
So the expectation certainly seems to be that this record will fall when he gets a proper run at overclocking the 8086K with a larger selection of chips.
Part of the attraction of the Core i7-8086K is that it can hit 5GHz (via turbo) out of the box without any overclocking at all, and whether using liquid nitrogen or straightforward air cooling, this chip should be impressive when it comes to juicing it up.
If you fancy chancing your arm in a competition to win one of the new 8086K chips, Intel’s sweepstakes is still open at the time of writing, and will be for the remainder of the day in the UK (or until 5pm PT in the US, which is 8pm ET). All you have to do is provide your email address to enter.