All praise be to Threadripper 7995WX, the multi-core monarch of Cinebench.
Over the past week, AMD’s overclocking team has been working hard to push the company’s newest Threadripper CPU to its limit. They began testing on an expensive air cooler before switching to an unusual liquid cooler, and as we anticipated when they released those findings, they have now proceeded to the experiment’s last phase—liquid nitrogen.
While AMD’s Bill “Sampson” Alverson conducted the earlier overclocking tests, two teams—Alverson and Emit Mehra from AMD and Jon “Elmor” Sandström and Roman “Der8auer” Hartung, who is well-known for his earlier overclocking exploits—took on the LN2 project. Using an air cooler in the earlier experiments, Alverson was able to boost the chip’s frequency to 4.8GHz on all cores and then up to 5GHz when using liquid. Both teams were able to significantly raise those clock frequencies using LN2. Der8auer and Elmor managed to raise the clocks to 6Hz on every core of the 96-core CPU operating at a frigid -32C, while AMD employee Sampson managed to reach 5.55GHz.
According to the HWBot database, the 6GHz overclock enabled a Cinebench R23 score of 201,501, good enough for fourth place overall. In comparison, a Ryzen 9 7950X achieves a score of about 38,000 on this test, indicating a slight rise. It’s also noteworthy that AMD’s flagship Threadripper CPU has scored seven out of the top ten times in Cinebench R23. The other three processors are the server version of this chip, the Epyc 9654, which has 96 cores and 192 threads. Remarkably, LN2, which was juiced to 6,250MHz, was also used to set the world record for this test.
These figures probably mean that AMD’s overclocking experiments with its most recent Threadripper CPU are coming to an end. We’ll see if the crew chooses to try liquid helium now that it has successfully ascended the mountain, or if it decides to take a break for Thanksgiving. But because AMD has many more cores and threads than Intel, the team’s exploits solidify AMD’s superiority over Intel in the overclocking and testing arena—at least for workstation and HEDT CPUs.
Since Intel’s future Emerald Rapids Xeon chips would increase the number of cores from 56 in the current chip to 64 when they launch next year, AMD’s dominance is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon.