A CPU world record has been broken by dousing a $6,000+ AMD chip in liquid nitrogen

AMD Threadripper CPU render with name on chip — (Image credit: AMD)

It's a shame that AMD's Threadripper processors are no longer in the reach of most enthusiast gamers because the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX just crushed a Cinebench run to net itself the world record. Proving once again that AMD's mammoth chip is not to be trifled with.

With a multithreaded score of 116,142 in Cinebench R23, overclocker TSAIK has net themselves the world number one spot (spotted by 9550pro on Twitter), beating out user blueleader with two AMD Epyc 7763 server chips at 113,566.

CB R23 HOFhttps://t.co/cHtt9wp7oJ https://t.co/2ZDaPk6UsF pic.twitter.com/U3d2dJ6Mj8August 3, 2022

The 5995WX is the biggest and baddest chip in AMD's Threadripper lineup, which originally began as an enthusiast desktop CPU range. It's not so much nowadays, however, as the 5995WX will set you back $6,499—tough to come to terms with paying that amount of money without access to the company credit card.

Still, it's an absolute monster of a processor, with 64 Zen 3 cores with 128 available threads, running at up to 4.5GHz boost clock. That naturally gives this chip a leg-up in multithreaded benchmarks such as the Cinebench R23 run it's dominated today, but there is of course more to this feat than mere silicon power alone.

The overclocker responsible for this run, TSAIK, has used liquid nitrogen to run this chip at 5,150MHz, which is an impressive 650MHz bump (if not more in actual clock terms), especially for a multithreaded run. With a single-threaded run you could expect to see a massive leap in clock speed, as it's only necessary to cherry-pick the best core on the silicon and push that to its limits. Whereas with a multithreaded run you sort of need as many cores working as possible to pump up that score.

And to use liquid nitrogen on a processor worth that much money… that takes some metal. Think of the nerves you'd get setting up the pot on top of that chip, knowing that if you get something wrong you could be waving goodbye to over $6,000.

Though that does make me think this record may stick around for a while. How often is an overclocker going to have a 5995WX to hand to try and break world records with?

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.