It's only been a day since the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X launched and it looks like some have already started pushing these new Zen 5 chips to their limits. They're some of the most powerful processors on the market (if not quite the best CPUs for gaming), so it's no surprise they can clock very high when push comes to shove.
MSI pointed out (via Wccftech) that a world record clock speed has been set for the AMD Ryzen 9000-series. This seems to be referring to overclocker TSAIK's recorded clock speeds of of 7.4 GHz for the 12-core 9900X and 7.44 GHz for the 16-core 9950X, as submitted to overclocking score aggregator site HWBot. For reference, the stock boost clock of both chips is 5.6 GHz, which in turn is over 2 GHz higher than their respective base clocks.
The big score is the one for the 9950X. This 7.44 GHz almost matches the highest frequency I could find on HWBot for the previous-gen AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, which is 7.47 GHz, achieved by overclocker rog-fisher. But that these new chips have only been out a day, and the fact they're already approaching that previous-gen record is neat.
Of course, this score doesn't come close to the highest frequencies achieved by any overclock. Last year, for instance, Asus broke the clock speed world record with over 9 GHz on the Intel Core i9 14900KF. But, y'know, apples and oranges. And who's wanting to push Intel chips above defaults these days, anyway, with all the stability issues even at previous default settings?
These AMD chip overclocks clearly won't have been achieved with anything like a standard cooling setup. As with all extreme overclocks, the chips will have been cooled using liquid nitrogen, which I've heard is a very tricky thing to do right. Everything has to be waterproofed and if you cool the chip too quickly it can crack—it's not something for the faint of heart to try.
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While we can't expect anything close to these record clock speeds from a regular overclock, it's nice to know the chips are capable of it when push comes to shove. Nice, but not all too surprising given Zen 5's architectural improvements that allow for better power and heat efficiency.
It's certainly good to see what Zen 5 chips are capable of when pushed given that the mid-range AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X are shipping in what seems, for all intents and purposes, like eco mode. So much so, in fact, that it's rumoured AMD will give these mid-range chips a post-launch TDP boost.
It is, however, a shame that the 9900X and 9950X are about as expensive as they come, at least for now. Let's hope for price drops before too long—my money's on some cuts when Intel Arrow Lake CPUs launch.
