Intel Skylake i7-6700K Manages 6.5GHz on Liquid Nitrogen

The synthetic benchmarks of Intel’s highly anticipated 14nm Skylake microarchitecture have started to emerge and the results are fairly promising. More specifically, the i7-6700K is approximately 3% faster at stock in 3DMARK 11 with only a 200MHz clock deficit verses the i7-4970K. This translates to a 8% IPC improvement which is fairly expected given Intel’s performance increases in the past. When combined with a dedicated GPU, the performance increase doubles from 3% to 6% based on an IPC increase of 11%.

In terms of overclocking headroom, the i7-6700K is a beast and managed to reach 5.2GHz alongside a fairly modest air cooler at 1.35v. The full performance of this chip is starting to be unveiled after an overclocking enthusiast entitled, “PLG” achieved 6.5GHz with a voltage of 2.032v using liquid nitrogen. Additionally, PLG opted for the MSI Gaming Z170 motherboard and overclocked a single DDR4 memory module to a staggering 4287MHz.

Interestingly, Skylake dissipates heat in a much more efficient manner but it’s important to reiterate that liquid nitrogen has yielded huge clock boosts in the past. A number of professional overclockers have attained 6.50GHz and even 7.GHz speeds using Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs. This means we shouldn’t realistically expect a clock speed this high. Furthermore, it’s uncertain how this will alter the framerate in modern games. Usually, synthetic benchmarks are an interesting tool but rarely translate to dramatic changes in real world scenarios.

Thank you MyGaming.co.za for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of VideoCardz.