Someone just overclocked Intel’s Core i9-14900KF to a record-breaking 9GHz

Overclocking has come a long way in the past several years, with extreme overclockers often reaching insane levels of processing speed in the latest CPUs. Most people tend to reach for small upgrades to their CPU’s base power, overclocking enough to improve performance. However, one overclocker has reached a record-breaking overclock on an Intel Core i9-14900KF CPU, reaching a bewildering 9.1GHz.

Just a few days after Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh launch, extreme overclocker Jon “Elmor” Sandström from ElmorLabs has overclocked an i9-14900KF CPU over 50 percent beyond its out-the-box boost clock of 6GHz. The effort took several attempts, Techspot reports, and Sandström struggled to validate the overclocking on CPU-Z.

As noted above, the new 14th Gen Intel CPUs offer a 6GHz boost right out of the box. While that’s pretty high already, folks like Sandström like to push the limits of what these processors can do. To do that, though, you have to move beyond simple air and water-based cooling. Typically, extreme overclockers rely on liquid nitrogen cooling.

However, Sandström worked with ASUS this time around and utilized liquid helium. The group says they nearly ran out of liquid helium before confirming the new record-breaking overclocking on CPU-Z.

The group says that they reached a grand total of 9.1GHz at peak, however, they were only able to validate up to 9,043.92MHz using CPU-Z. Some kind of technical issues caused the program to interact poorly with that extreme of an overlock, so they weren’t able to lock in that particular record.

This isn’t the first time that Sandström has pushed the boundaries of what is possible when overclocking these CPUs, either. He previously edged out the 2012 record last October when he hit 8,812.85MHz with an i9-13900K. In December, he also broke the 9GH barrier on that same CPU, but this record-breaking CPU overclock is slightly higher than that.

Intel just launched these new chips last week, and they’re the same price as the previous lineup and seem to offer a bit more leeway for overclockers. This will also be one of the last lineups that support LGA 1700 socket motherboards, so future lineups will require completely new systems to run.