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What just happened? Intel launched its new Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" desktop CPUs earlier this week, and extreme overclockers are already pushing the chips to their limits. Renowned overclocking expert Elmor, who serves as Asus' in-house overclocking specialist, has set a new extreme overclocking world record with the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, reaching nearly 7.5 GHz.
Asus said the Core Ultra 9 285K in question was overclocked to an incredible 7,488.8 MHz using the ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard – nearly 1.8 GHz above the 285K's default boost clock of 5.7 GHz.
The overclocked CPU set record scores across multiple benchmarking applications, including 3DMark CPU Profile in 1T, 2T, 4T, and 8T tests. Additionally, it reached an impressive 60,840 points in Cinebench R23.
The ROG Maximus Z890 APEX also helped overclocker BenchMarc secure the highest DDR5 speed on record, with the G.Skill CUDIMM DDR5 reaching an impressive 12,066 MT/s. This is a substantial leap from the previous record, where the V-Color CUDIMM achieved 10,600 MT/s on Gigabyte's AORUS Z890 Tachyon ICE motherboard.
Other overclockers who also broke the 12,000 MT/s barrier include OGS from Greece (12,046 MT/s), Dreadzone from Australia (12,046 MT/s), and CENS from Germany (12,042 MT/s).
With these latest overclocking achievements, Elmor surpassed his own record from late last month, when he teamed up with SafeDisk to push the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X to an astounding 7.54 GHz. That record, set on the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E HERO motherboard, achieved multiple global first places across well-known benchmarks and real-world applications, including Cinebench R23, Cinebench R20, Geekbench, 7-Zip, and HWBot.
The Core Ultra 9 285K, Intel's flagship Arrow Lake-S desktop processor, features 24 cores – eight P-cores and 16 E-cores – along with 36 MB of L3 cache and 40 MB of L2 cache. Each P-core has 3 MB of L2 cache, while the E-cores are grouped into clusters of four, with each cluster sharing 4 MB of L2 cache. The processor supports dual-channel DDR5-5600 UDIMM memory or DDR5-6400 CUDIMM memory, and offers 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes along with four PCIe 4.0 lanes.