An Intel Core i7 processor has been paired with a Gigabyte motherboard to set a world record for overclocking multipliers. A six-core i7 3930K, which normally runs at 3.2GHz, was overclocked to 5.6GHz with a record multiplier of 57x. The Motherboard used with the i7-3930k was a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 with an Intel X79 chipset and showed the relative headroom the gaming-focused platform has.
The Core i7 3970k, which began shipping in November, is Intel’s second most powerful processor in its second wave of Sandy Bridge family of processors. The only faster processor is the i7-3960X, with a clock speed of 3.3GHz.
Although this latest effort may have set a record for Intel Core i7 chips and for overclocking multipliers, the Guinness Book of Records benchmark for CPU processor speeds is held by an AMD processor. In October, an eight-core AMD Bulldozer (running on only two cores) was clocked at 8.43GHz. Its multiplier was 31x.