With new X870 and X870E motherboards launching this week for AMD CPUs, there are plenty of dry specs to get through. Motherboard manufacturer Asus, however, has gone down a different path to show off the potential of its next-gen motherboards by breaking five different overclocking records, pushing an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU to a staggering 7.55GHz clock speed.
To put that into perspective, the Ryzen 9 9950X has a typical clock speed of 4.3GHz and a boost clock speed of 5.7GHz. It’s already the fastest AMD processor you can buy, and arguably one of the best gaming CPUs out there right now. With a 1.85GHz overclock applied using this brand-new Asus motherboard, this 9950X is stomping well ahead of its stock performance.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something you’re going to be able to do for yourself, unless you’re trained to use liquid nitrogen. Asus’ team of overclockers (using the handles Safedisk and Elmor) used a ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard to achieve the feat, using a custom liquid nitrogen set-up to keep the CPU cool as they pushed it to its brand-new limit.
The team set out first to hit a new AMD CPU frequency record, which they achieved, hitting exactly 7548.68MHz. This is the highest recorded overclock for a Ryzen CPU to date, and you can check out the validation for yourself by clicking this link. Further benchmarks with records broken include Geekbench 3 Multi-core, Cinebench R20 and R23, HWBOT x265 4K, and 7-Zip.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen impressive 9950X overclocks in the wild, with AMD engineers pushing the 9950X to 6.6GHz a few months ago. Like Asus’ attempt, liquid nitrogen was used to cool the CPU to extremely low temperatures of -202°F (-130°C). However, this attempt by Asus takes things further, going as low as -306.4°F (-188°C).
The ROG Crosshair motherboard is just one of several X870 and X870E motherboards launching this week for the latest AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs, but it’s probably best to leave liquid nitrogen setups like this one to the professionals. If you’re thinking about a new build, you might want to read through our how to build a gaming PC guide next to give yourself a refresher.