What we have seen from the previous pages is that there is not that much new with this 7th generation. Higher clock speeds together with the encoding power seem to be the biggest assets for Kaby Lake. But hold your horses, tweakers and overclockers will cheer for Kaby Lake. Remember Sandy Bridge when people were running their processors at that magical 5GHz speed on air or water? No extreme cooling was needed to get very strong performance back in those days! Now with each CPU generation Intel released we saw those daily overclocks being reduced generation on generation. Okay the new releases were more efficient clock per clock, though the sweetness of those OC'ed Sandy Bridges still left most with a hunger for more speed.

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Well sadly we didn't reach 5GHz on our test sample, but 4.9Ghz on all cores was pretty easy with a slight bump in voltage. Out of the box our CPU was set to run at its default speeds of 4.2GHz and 4.5GHz Turbo clocks at 1.35Vcore.  By adding +0.05Vcore we reached 4.9GHz on ALL cores, which is kind of awesome to increase the clocks all round without really the need of massive voltage adjustments.

An important setting to play with is the AVX offset value, to gain higher clocks it is advisable to leave this usually a few multipliers below the core ratio setting (negative offset). So when the AVX instruction is not used you have the full processor speed available, once AVX is used it will drop all cores to the set AVX Offset value.

Here are some comparisons between stock and our OC'ed setup running at 4.9Ghz:

For 2D applications that can use all the power you throw at them, they will love the headroom these Kaby Lake processors have under the hood. It is up to you to unleash the beast! Gamers will have plenty of power with the out of the box clocks.

So how come we weren't able to reach 5GHz and beyond? Well the answer is pretty simple: HEAT. Even at stock the Kaby Lake was crunching at around 74°C, this while being cooled by the Be Quiet Silent loop 240. Not the best performing AIO on the market, but a very decent product after all with an excellent cooling versus noise ratio. When we raised the clocks to 4.9GHz we saw a drastic performance increase but also the core temperatures were going bonkers. In Realtemp we logged 95°C on some cores.

We effectively ran 5GHz but the multithreaded scores got lower as the CPU activated the throttling mechanism to protect itself from overheating. To really drop the temperatures, delidding the Kaby Lake processor is a necessity. On the internet temperature drops of 20 to even 30°C have been reported, which is massive. Sadly the processor sample provided had to go back in its original state, so delidding was not an option. Next week we will provide more data from CES where we will have the chance to play with the new 7th generation on liquid nitrogen.

Our chaps at Eteknix already launched their delidding article and the temperature gain over the stock Intel thermal paste is around 20°C, allowing their CPU to hum at a whopping 5GHz and according their conclusion never even breaching 80°C.

(pictures courtesy of Eteknix.com)

Early LN2 results have shattered the rankings at the overclockers' favorite website, HWBot.org. On liquid Nitrogen American overclocker "Splave" aka Allen Golibersuch has set new World Records in most 2D benchmarks. Powered by his trusty ASRock Z170 Formula he even surpassed 7GHz with just 2 cores running. In full multithreaded mode he was able to rock hard at 6.8Ghz, something which only a handful gem Skylakes could achieve. There will be more to come on the CES trade show for sure.