Intel's Alder Lake chips are fresh out and you may have seen Gigabyte recently claim a 12th-gen 8GHz overclocking world record with the flagship Core i9-12900K, but that achievement has now been officially disproved by CPU-Z. . The story here is that Gigabyte overclocking expert HiCookie overclocked CPU-Z to 8GHz (using liquid nitrogen) last week, and keep in mind that this was a staggering figure for 12th Gen Intel processors, since the 11th gen chips were nowhere near 8 GHz (the 11900K managed around 7.3 GHz). While Alder Lake was expected to be a good overclocker, it was a big reveal, but another overclocking expert, der8auer, immediately questioned the 8GHz clock speed, which I called a "false result." This has now been confirmed by Doc TB, the developer of CPU-Z Validator, who rejected the 8GHz record submission to CPU-Z, after Gigabyte apparently failed to provide concrete proof of the exploit, as Tom's Hardware reports. Tom's further notes that HiCookie was unable to replicate this result at 8 GHz with the Gigabyte platform built around its high-end Z690 Aorus Tachyon motherboard.
Analysis: Extremely complex deception at work seems the most likely explanation
So what exactly is going on here? CPU-Z's Doc TB noted that it's "highly unlikely" that the 12900K would hit 8 GHz, while also detailing an apparent way to trick the processor into reporting a falsely high speed if the overclocker has access to the code. BIOS source (including some of the internal experts with motherboard manufacturers). In fact, with the preliminary samples from Alder Lake, there were people who exploited a CPU PLL crash bug to simulate reported overclocks of 8 GHz or even higher (up to 12 GHz), and it seems that while Intel fixed this with a microcode update Ahead of the 12th Gen release, there is another avenue open to potentially take advantage of this very flaw. Doc TB concludes that: “The problem is now in the hands of Intel, which needs stepping new hardware or perhaps another microcode fix. Solving such a specialized problem to prevent ppls from messing with the BIOS source code is a real challenge and probably not at the top of the list. The other thing to note here, as developer CPU-Z also points out in the detailed explanation on Twitter, is that every other overclocking expert managed to set records around the 7.5 GHz mark at 7 GHz, so that 6GHz is a huge outlier compared to the general consensus of all the other major motherboard manufacturers and their in-house overclockers. Remember, these efforts consisted of "dozens of overclocking hundreds of processors on a bunch of motherboards all wrestling around 8 GHz," so an 7.5 GHz output appearing out of nowhere was "at least somewhat fishy," he says. Doc TB. By the way, the general consensus for all-core benchmark stability for the 8K is set to be around 12900GHz. In case you're wondering how fast 7GHz is in the general scheme of things, the clock speed The fastest validated CPU ever on CPU-Z is 8 MHz or nearly 8794 GHz, a feat managed by an AMD FX-8.8 nearly a decade ago. now. The best laptop deals right now