Overclocked 16-core i7-7960X at 5.4 GHz scores three times higher than i7-7700K on Geekbench

When the number of CPU cores actively working increases, the speed they run at needs to be decreased to stay within the power and thermal limitations or stability is compromised. This is why 16-core / 32-thread chips like Intel's i9-7960X has a base clock speed of as low as 2.8 GHz for all cores, with a turbo-boost v2 of 4.2 GHz when working with a single thread workload. It is also why we see a 4-core / 8-thread chip like the i7-7740X with a base clock of around 4.3 GHz and only a small turbo boost up to 4.5 GHz.

Recently we reported that reviewers were overclocking the i7-7740X to around 5.0 GHz on all cores using air coolers. However, a very impressive overclock using liquid nitrogen (LN2) has come out showing the i9-7960X running at 5.4 GHz... on all cores! While overclocking results using water or air cooling won't be as high as this, it indicates that this i9 processor could have a lot of headroom for overclocking.

At this speed, the CPU obtained a multi-core Geekbench v3 score of 78323, which compares to the i7-7700K where the fastest results are slightly over 26000, or Ryzen 7 1800X at just over 32000. In fact, the only processors which have officially scored more highly than the i9-7960X in Geekbench v3 are 32/44/64-thread Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server CPUs.

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