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Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 CPU gets overclocked to a staggering 5.3GHz:
Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 processor can be pepped up massively, an expert overclocker has shown us, pushing the Alder Lake chip to a rather staggering 57% above its default clock speed.
This feat was achieved by Der8auer, a well-known German overclocker who has set many previous records when juicing up chips, and managed to get the G6900 CPU to hit 5,338MHz (up from the default base clock speed of 3.4GHz).
What's even more interesting here, aside from a low-end chip blazing away at over 5.3GHz, is that of course this is a non-K processor – only Intel's 'K' model CPUs are officially able to be overclocked. However, with Alder Lake, other models can be ramped up, at least if they're running on a Z690 (high-end) motherboard, using the BCLK unlock capability in the BIOS (BCLK meaning base clock).
Recently Der8auer has also demonstrated overclocking other Alder Lake non-K processors including Intel's Core i5-12400, with seriously impressive results (reaching 5,240MHz across all cores). Plus in this new video, he shows the Intel Core i3-12100 hitting 5,400MHz – about 26% faster than its rated boost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:32PM
5.3GHz hasn't been extreme for a long time. People were getting that with Sandy Bridge ten years ago using plain old room temperature water. Mine (I'm still using it) does 5GHz on air. CPUs were so stagnant in the last decade that it wasn't until Zen 2 or Intel 10th gen that anything really better was even available.
10GHz is near the theoretical limit for silicon, and the world record (for frequency, not performance) is about 8.8GHz, using liquid nitrogen. Not sure what is special about the AMD Bulldozer that lets it clock so high, but it does. It's not even a good CPU otherwise.
As for why, overclockers mostly do it because they can. It's interesting to see what the chips are actually capable of. Overclocking a low end part (not really even entry level, these are mostly for embedded systems) with a high end motherboard isn't very useful, but neither is liquid nitrogen. Even if you have a cheap motherboard, who even wants a dual core CPU? But it tells us something about the low end Core CPUs as well. The Celerons are the bottom binned CPU, anything they can do, better CPUs should be able to do too.
Back before multi core was a thing, overclocking Celerons was the thing to do if you wanted to save a few dollars.