It's going to be a busy few weeks for the record-books, as it always is when a brand new CPU range is released to the public, with new high watermarks being set all manner of metrics specific to Intel's Coffee Lake platform or compared in a wider context. Today ASUS ROG are staking an early claim of excellence, boasting outstanding LN2 overclocks and a new world record DDR4 Memory frequency, courtesy of professional overclockers and ASUS engineering.
Unsurprisingly, today's records are being made using Intel's flagship Core i7-8700K. A 6-core, 12-thread part that clocks from 3.7 to 4.7GHz (Base/Turbo) in stock configurations, Intel's top-end Coffee Lake CPU already exhibits some pretty outstanding performance metrics.
First up is German overclocker der8auer. You may recognise him from his critical work developing delidding tools for CPUs, or recent efforts opening eyes to the scorching temperature of poorly cooled power circuitry on a subset of overclocked X299 systems. By using the enormous cooling potential of LN2 - dropping the CPU down to -190C - he was able to reach a CPU core frequency of 7.3GHz with CPU-Z validation captured, almost twice the stock base clock! That was with all six cores and twelve threads enabled, a pretty outstanding feat when you consider that extreme overclocking to this extent often requires that all bar one CPU core be disabled.
View der8auer's validation of this run at http://hwbot.org/submission/3670844_.
Meanwhile Hocayu set to work on pushing memory frequencies, with great success. His single DIMM of G.Skill DDR4 DRAM was driven all the way to a new world record frequency of 5529.2MHz. Both G.Skill and ASUS were understandably pleased:
“The ASUS ROG Maximum X Apex motherboard is truly the best Z370 motherboard for memory overclocking. G.SKILL is glad to work with the ASUS ROG team to achieve such an incredible world record, as well as to announce the world’s fastest DDR4-4600 2 x 8GB memory kit of this generation on this amazing motherboard.” - says Tequila Huang, VP of R&D at G.SKILL.
Hocayu's validation for this run can be found at https://valid.x86.fr/tv1dz2.
An additional world record was broken by Italian overclocker Rsannino. A system configured with ASUS ROG motherboard and ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti was able to hit an overall 3DMark06 score of 73519 marks, in the process overclocking their i7-8700K to 7.010 GHz. That's some impressive stability shown for a system that was surely on the bleeding edge of the performance envelope.
All three of the above results were reached using ASUS's flagship ROG Maximus X Apex motherboard, a design tailored made for extreme overclocking and high grade performance in all walks of life.
The ASUS ROG Maximus X series launches with Maximus X Hero, Maximus X Code, Maximus X Apex and Maximus X Formula SKUs, providing a wide range of feature sets for gamers and enthusiasts alike. An additional selection of motherboards - the Z370-E, Z370-F, Z370-H, Z370-G and Z370-I - are sold under the mainstream ASUS ROG Strix gaming brand and offer both performance and overclocking tools in multiple form factors for a variety of system setups.
More information of the ongoing record-breaking efforts using ASUS ROG hardware can be found on the official blog. And of course you can read more about the hardware itself at https://rog.asus.com/.
Also, why not check out our launch review of the ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F.
