Overclocker pushes Threadripper 1950X to 5.37GHz using liquid nitrogen
Exotic cooling is required to reach crazy high clockspeeds on Threadripper.
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Threadripper might not be the best overclocking chip in the world, but blanket it in liquid nitrogen and it quickly loosens up, as is often the case. In this instance, an overclocker who goes by "TheOverclocker" chilled a Threadripper 1950X CPU with LN2 and then pushed all 16 physical cores to 5.37GHz.
He achieved the feat using an Asus ROG X399 Zenith Extreme motherboard and 32GB of DDR4 memory set at 2500MHz with CL9 timings. In order to hit 5.37GHz, he had to crank the voltage all the way up to 1.67v, which allowed him to push the BLCK to 107.96 MHz with a 49.75 multiplier.
AMD claims that Threadripper is binned from the "best five percent" of Ryzen dies. In theory, that means Threadripper should overclocker a bit better, though things can get tricky when working with higher core counts. There is also luck of the draw to consider. Just the other day, we posted an article about an overclocker pushing a Threadripper 1950X CPU to 4.1GHz using a liquid cooler. In our own testing, 3.9GHz at 1.375V was at the ragged edge of stability, though it ran pretty hot. We saw much better results at 3.8GHz at just 1.25V.
A look around the web shows other review sites getting mixed results as well, so as always your mileage may vary, at least on air and liquid cooling.
Getting back to the LN2-cooled chip, TheOverclocker benchmarked the CPU in Cinebench R15 and scored 4,514 points, the highest yet for a Threadripper chip, according to HWBOT's database. To put that into perspective, we scored 3,336 with a Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 3.9GHz.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).


