Overclocked Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU hits 7.2GHz, drawing over 800W

With the G.SKILL OC World Cup 2023 Grand Finals taking place at Computex 2023, we saw impressive overclocking skills in person, pushing CPUs and DDR5 memory to speeds requiring a steady dose of liquid nitrogen.

But there was a little more overclocking action at the show care of Level1Techs' Wendel, Bryan from Tech Yes City, and a team of expert overclockers from ASRock.

The mission? To push the 16 performance cores in Intel's new Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs to new heights, 7.2GHz to be exact. Paired with the ASRock W790 motherboard, the workstation CPU was able to hit a stable speed of 6.1GHz, where it managed to deliver an impressive Cinebench R23 score of around 46,000. This easily trumps the Intel Core i9 13900K score of around 38,000.

Unfortunately, they could not successfully complete any benchmark runs at this overclocked frequency - but hitting it was still impressive. Bryan from Tech Yes City joked that they should try and push for over 10GHz, though that was wishful thinking.

Where it gets eye-opening is that thanks to the Xeon CPUs making full use of performance cores, the 6.1GHz across 16 of them meant that each core was drawing 50W of power. Do the math, and that's a whopping 800W for a single test. So, yeah, not exactly efficient, but overclocking has never been about that.

At Computex 2023, ASRock had a number of cool new products on display. From its new range of Intel Z790 Wi-Fi 7 motherboards, Taichi Lite range for AMD and Intel CPUs to several new displays. Check them out below.

• Read more: ASRock showcases new high-end Intel Z790 Wi-Fi 7 motherboards and a new Taichi Lite range.
• Read more: ASRock unveils the PG32UMF at Computex 2023, a glorious 4K 144Hz UHD IPS display.
• Read more: ASRock reveal stunning 55-inch 8K IPS display at Computex 2023.