Intel Core i7-9700K reportedly overclocked to 5.3GHz with air cooling

Intel’s 9th Generation processors are possibly the worst kept secret in the PC industry, offering consumers up to eight cores on the company’s existing 300-series motherboard platform.

The penultimate processor in this series is the i7-9700K, an eight-core processor that lacks support for Hyperthreading, giving it a total of eight threads. This processor has already appeared on the Geekbench database (link), confirming that processor samples are already in the wild. 

Intel’s 9th Generation flagships are reported to offer increased overclocking potential when compared to their 8th Generation Coffee Lake counterparts, with leaked Intel documentation claiming that the company’s 9th Generation i7 and i9 series processors are soldered, allowing these processors to more efficiently transfer heat away from its silicon. 

A report from expreview has claimed that Intel’s i7-9700K has been overclocked to 5.3GHz at 1.215 volts under air cooling, a staggeringly high overclock considering the processor’s voltage. No benchmarking data was shown for this overclocked processor, making it likely that this 5.3GHz overclock is unstable. It is equally likely that the voltage shown in the CPU-Z screenshot below is inaccurate, making it possible that higher voltages are being used to deliver such a high core clock speed.