8 GHz Core i9-14900K Sets New Record in CS2 With 1,310 FPS | Tom’s Hardware

What do you get when you have a Core i9-14900K, one of the best CPUs, and an endless flow of liquid nitrogen (LN2? A lot of world records, of course. Team Australia Extreme Overclocking (Team.AU) and Intel have set some exciting records at SXSW Sydney 2023.

During a live demonstration, Team.AU pushed the Core i9-14900K between 7.5 GHz and 8 GHz on Gigabyte’s Z790 Aorus Tachyon X motherboard. Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager, Enthusiast PC and Workstation
, Client Computing Group, energetically fed the Core i9-14900K with LN2 to keep it cool. The Core i9-14900K has a maximum boost clock of 6 GHz; therefore, Team.AU’s feat represents a 33% overclock. It’s a significant overclock, but it’s still leagues below the current world record of 9,043.92 MHz set by the Core i9-14900KF.

While Team.AU’s Core i9-14900K is not even close to catching the world record holder, it set a performance record in Counter-Strike 2. The overclocked Core i9-14900K was pumping out frame rates up to a staggering 1,310 FPS. It wasn’t just a static scene, either. The Core i9-14900K was game-stable as a guest from the crowd was enjoying a round of Counter-Strike 2 and racking up several kills. Currently, there aren’t any commercial gaming monitors that can handle that type of frame rate. Asus’ ROG Swift Pro PG248QP, which has a 540 Hz refresh rate, suddenly doesn’t feel so fast anymore.

The Core i9-14900K pushing frame rates over 1,300 FPS on Counter-Strike 2 wasn’t the only highlight at SXSW Sydney 2023. Team.AU also broke the DDR5 world record, aggressively driving Gigabyte’s DDR5-8333 16GB memory module to DDR5-11618. Unlike the Counter-Strike 2 record, the system was at borderline stability as the overclockers received a BSOD shortly after hitting the frequency. Fortune was smiling on them as they had just enough time to submit the result to HWbot, and now we have a new DDR5 overclocking world record.

Intel’s 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors are available worldwide at your favorite retailer. As usual, the Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i5-14600K lead the pack, with the non-K series part arriving shortly after. The refreshed chips are marginally faster than the regular Raptor Lake counterparts but retain the exact pricing.

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.