TECH NEWS – With the clock speed cranked up to 8 GHz, a recently released game can achieve frame rates that we can’t even see with our eyes…

TweakTown reports on the power of Intel’s 14th generation processors. Tuning has been a subculture among PC enthusiasts for decades, and now there’s a real race among experts to get the highest possible clock speed and resulting frame rate. At SXSW Sydney, Team AU overclocked the Raptor Lake Refresh processor to an unprecedented level of performance.

Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 was recently released. It’s not that demanding on the machine, considering it’s an eSports game. But it ran at over 1300 FPS! 144, maybe even 240 FPS is just barely noticeable if you have a monitor capable of it, but that’s a result our eyes can’t handle. But this performance is not possible on simple home configurations. Not even a serious liquid metal cooling system will do!

For the 8 GHz clock speed, overclockers used a lot of liquid nitrogen, but even Intel was represented: It was Roger Chandler, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Customer Computing Group for enthusiast PCs and workstations, who injected the first dose. Hence Intel’s support of the tuning community, and essentially an official recognition of the achievements when such a leader was present.

The Intel Core i9-14900K processor comes with a 6 GHz boost clock speed by default, which is a significant achievement in itself, but it has been bumped up to 8 GHz for maximum performance, achieving 1310 FPS in Counter-Strike 2. Since Valve’s game relies on our processor rather than our graphics card, it’s understandable that this game was chosen as a test subject. 8 GHz isn’t bad, but there have been examples at 9.1 GHz, so 1310 FPS could be higher.

The Raptor Lake Refresh family of processors has already piqued the interest of overclockers, and the low price means gamers are likely to invest in one of these CPUs when they’re ready to upgrade. Oh, the team also broke the DDR5 RAM speed record (5768 MHz).

Source: WCCFTech