Less than a week out from launch, overclockers have already pushed Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X clock speeds to staggering highs. MSI now holds the world record overclock for these chips, after putting one of its high-end motherboards to work alongside liquid nitrogen. The company’s efforts saw the processors soar well above stock speeds, even going beyond 7GHz.
On paper, Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X are the new chips to beat on the block. They’re the best CPUs AMD’s Zen 5 architecture has to offer, with 16 and 12 cores, respectively. While their stock performance isn’t earth-shattering, it’s clear these processors have plenty more to give if pushed. For reference, out of the box, 9900X base clock is 4.4GHz, boosting to 5.6GHz, while 9950X runs at 4.3GHz and climbs to 5.6GHz.
Working together with MSI, overclocker TSAIK took prime position on the HWBot (via WCCFTech) leaderboard for the Ryzen CPUs in question. Using liquid nitrogen and a lot of know-how, they achieved clock speeds of 7.4GHz on Ryzen 9 9900X and 7.45GHz Ryzen 9 9950X.
Ryzen 9 9900X required a surprisingly high voltage of 1.844V Vcore, while the Ryzen 9 9950X asked for a more modest 1.625V. Suffice to say, these voltages would’ve fried these chips if not for the extreme LN2 cooling. Pushing so much power while remaining stable is no easy task, and MSI’s MEG X670E Ace should receive due credit.
While this is an impressive feat, it’s not the highest overclock on record. Overclocker Elmor holds that coveted title, after pushing a Core i9-14900KS to a whopping 9.11GHz. To be fair, they did use liquid helium in that case, which is even cooler than liquid nitrogen.
In addition to these clock speed records, TSAIK also claims some impressive Cinebench scores too. In R23, they achieved a multi-core score of 60,185 with Ryzen 9 9950X and 46,281 with Ryzen 9 9900X. For context, that’s equivalent to 2/3 of a 64-core Threadripper 7980X performance. Not bad for something a quarter of its size.
While these achievements aren’t reflective of real-world performance, they do show how far architectures can go with exceptional cooling and power at their disposal. We’ve not seen the last of Zen 5 as 9000X3D processors should arrive in the coming months. So, expect to see more overclockers breaking world records in the near future.