Intel's new Alder Lake flagship CPU Core i9-12900K has been overclocked to 8 GHz

Even though recent reports revealed Intel's misleading benchmark comparisons between its new Alder Lake CPUs and the competing AMD Ryzen processors, it nevertheless became clear that Intel's new flagship CPU Core i9-12900K (from US$649 on Newegg) will have a significant amount of headroom for overclocking. We previously reported on several overclockers who managed to push the Core i9-12900K's clock frequency as high as 7.42 GHz.

The well-known Taiwanese overclocker HiCookie has now easily smashed this previous record. In collaboration with the gaming devision at Gigabyte, also known under the brand name Aorus, the professional overclocker was able to raise the clock frequency of the Core i9-1200K's high-performance Golden Cove cores to an incredible 8 GHz. The according screenshots of the CPU-Z validation have since been posted on the official Spanish Twitter account of Aorus.

In order to reach such insane clock speeds, the overclocker utilized a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Tachyon motherboard and a single 16GB module of DDR5 memory which was also massively overclocked to DDR5-8300. He further used a liquid nitrogen cooling solution. No benchmark results have been posted for the Core i9-12900K running at 8 GHz, but those might be published when Intel's official Alder Lake embargo has been lifted. However, this latest impressive overclocking result leaves little doubt that the Intel Core i9-12900K will have significant headroom for overclocking, especially in comparison to its predecessor Core i9-11900K, which was overclocked to a maximum of only 7.3 GHz.