While the world was momentarily excited about binned Core i7 8700Ks given out as "Anniversary Edition" CPUs branded as the 8086, the mainstream 8700Ks are well worthy of our attention too, especially considering their overclocking potential. One overclocker has managed to push one of the six-core chips up to 7.4GHz and in turn, destroyed the world record for SuperPi 32M.
The out-of-the-box 8700K starts its life at a 3.7Ghz base clock and boosts up to 4.7GHz as and when required. With an unlocked multiplier though, the potential is there for it to go much further and that's exactly where Daniel "Dancop" Schier," took it.
Disabling half of the cores and turning his 8700K into a three-core, six-thread chip to improve its overclocking ability, he chilled the chip down with liquid nitrogen and began to tweak away. Although he hit several milestones along the way, the chip ultimately was able to hit 7,344.5MHz and better yet, it was very stable.
Running an old copy of Windows XP, the super-speedy system was able to run an instance of SuperPI 32M and recorded a time of just 4 minutes, 7 seconds and 609ms. The previous record was only a little slower, at 4 minutes 8 seconds and 47ms, but it was slower, nonetheless.
The 8700K is just about the best chip in the world for this particular benchmark right now, dominating the leaderboard on . The only other chip to even feature once in the top 10 is the 7740X and the 7700K makes an appearance a little further down the scale.
Elsewhere in Dancop's benching system, he employed a 200-series chipset motherboard, 16GB of G-Skill memory running at 2,078MHz, and of course extreme cooling on not only the CPU, but the power modules too.
