AMD Ryzen 7 2700X gets overclocked to break the 6GHz barrier

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

AMD has unleashed its Ryzen 2nd Generation processors to much acclaim, and overclockers have already been pushing the new flagship model, with the 6GHz barrier now having been broken (following a 5.884GHz overclock earlier this week).

Expert overclockers Der8auer and Neo took the Ryzen 7 2700X, which has a base clock of 3.7GHz, and ramped it up to a blistering 6.0GHz over all eight of the processor’s cores using a voltage of 1.85v.

Cooling was provided by liquid nitrogen, as is usually the case with these sort of big boosts. These aren’t the sort of results you can get on a normal PC with conventional cooling, of course, and neither was the CPU stable enough to run things at this level.

It’s just impressive that the speed could be physically reached when the right processor was found (the overclockers had a number of samples to hand, and of course all CPUs – even those of the same model – vary somewhat in their tolerance for being juiced up).

Steaming past Skylake-X

Wccftech.com reports that benchmarks were successfully run at a stable 5.7GHz, with the 2700X setting some new world records for eight-core processors, and indeed besting Intel’s Core i9-7980XE (Skylake-X) processor which was cranked to a higher 6.1GHz.

So that’s an impressive result all round for AMD, with the new Ryzen 7 2700X certainly making a big splash. In our Ryzen 7 2700X review, we gave it full marks, and called it the “best consumer processor on the market right now”, no less, beating out its Core i7-8700K rival on the Intel side.

In other words, you don’t need liquid-nitrogen and mad overclocking chops to be able to feel the benefit of the new 2700X.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).