Intel Core i9-14900KF is officially the fastest ever CPU with record-breaking overclock – and the best is yet to come

Comes close to 9.1GHz, and we can expect faster speeds to be reached

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Intel’s Core i9-14900KF has just been released, and the flagshipRaptor Lake Refresh processorhas broken the previous world record for overclocking.

The Core i9-14900KF – which is the same as the plain 14900K, it just doesn’t have integrated graphics – was ramped up to 9044MHz (or 9.04GHz) by a team of overclockers from Asus (including SkatterBencher, a name that should be familiar to anyone who keeps up with the CPU overclocking scene).

AsTom’s Hardwarereports, that was achieved on a single core (a performance one, of course) using liquid helium for cooling. The PC used was built around an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard and a 1200W Enermax power supply.

The overclock pips the previous world record by 35MHz, so not a massive amount by any means, but at the top-end of the overclocking scene, even slight gains are impressive.

Those small advances aren’t easy to achieve, and as SkatterBencher makes clear, it took an entire week to edge out the previous record (held by the 13900KF, as you might have guessed).

Analysis: 9.1GHz and beyond…

Getting close to 9.1GHz is obviously an eye-opening achievement, although it’s not the first time the 9GHz barrier has been broken – thepast record with the 13900KF was 9.008GHz.

Interestingly, with the record nabbed, the Asus team did push harder with the 14900KF and actually saw 9.1GHz achieved – but only very briefly before the system locked up. The PC wasn’t stable enough, for long enough, at that speed to actually validate the overclock, but 9.1GHz was technically reached.

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Given that this is an initial overclocking attempt, it’s very likely that 9.1GHz will be fully achieved – in a stable fashion – by the Raptor Lake Refresh flagship, because gains with new silicon are always better down the line.

Indeed, there’s every chance we could see more than that, as if you recall, the13900K initially hit an 8.8GHz overclock, before it was pushed above 9GHz a couple of months later. Stay tuned, then.

While it’s undeniably pacey in terms of pure clock speeds, as we cover in our review, theCore i9-14900K is not the best bet for the average PC owner– particularly not gamers.

As for the 14700K, on the other hand… well, that impressed us enough to grab the top spot in ourbest processorslist (though it’snot without some drawbacks compared to its predecessor).

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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