In context: It’s no secret that AMD is stealing Intel’s thunder and slowly but surely chipping away some sizeable market share. Now it’s gaining even more respect in the minds of gamers and overclocking enthusiasts with a processor that shatters world records.
Ryzen 5000 series desktop CPUs dropped this week, and they sold out in minutes at all major retailers, leading to the all-familiar scenario of coveted components ending up on eBay with inflated prices.
There’s a good reason for the high demand, as we’ve noted in our review of the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X. Both CPUs offer solid performance when compared to Intel’s Core i9-10900K in single core and gaming scenarios, but they also offer more cores, which means staggeringly faster productivity performance.
Overclockers are also enthusiastic about the new processors, and have been busy pushing the limits farther using exotic cooling methods. Popular overclocker HiCookie managed to get the Ryzen 9 5950X to 6.362 GHz on all 16 cores while using liquid nitrogen cooling. This was accomplished using a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master motherboard and 16 GB of Corsair DDR4 memory.
The overclock was stable enough to allow a Cinebench R20 run, which yielded a score of 15,517 points. For reference, the unit used in our review achieved a score of 10,157 points, so the new result is impressive indeed.
As of writing, this seems to be the highest verified result, and it’s certainly the highest for a consumer processor of this caliber. Its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 3950X went up to a maximum of 6,073 MHz on liquid nitrogen, achieving a Cinebench R20 score of 12,757 points.
