7503 MHz Intel Arrow Lake with Liquid Helium
As is tradition, I joined the ASUS ROG team and Elmor to overclock Intel Arrow Lake with liquid helium and got up to 7.5 GHz … sort of.
Introduction
With every new Intel CPU launch, the ASUS ROG team pulls out all stops and wheels in the liquid helium tank to aim for the highest frequency. That has resulted in numerous records, including the overall frequency world record set last year at 9.1 GHz with Raptor Lake’s final hurrah.
Arrow Lake is a significant change from prior architectures as it is the first desktop CPU with disaggregated tile design. I covered Arrow Lake overclocking in a number of blog posts:
In a way Arrow Lake is not too dissimilar from Sapphire Rapids as that’s also a tile-based CPU. I didn’t cover Sapphire Rapids extreme overclocking in depth, but suffice to say there are severe cold-related issues starting at around -100 degrees Celsius.
Fortunately, with a lot of effort it seems at least some Arrow Lake CPUs are capable of running at extremely low temperatures.
Arrow Lake Extreme Overclocking Results
To keep a long story short: our goal was to achieve at least 7.5 GHz with Arrow Lake – not too far off what Alder Lake was capable of at launch. We saw 7.5 GHz pop up on the screen at least a couple of times, but after a day and a half (!) of testing, the maximum frequency achieved was 7488.8 MHz.
The key challenge with Arrow Lake helium overclocking is that even though some chips can run “full pot” with liquid nitrogen, their coldbug is very near that temperature. So, we often saw the Arrow Lake CPUs hit a coldbug slightly below -200 degrees Celsius.
A key upside of the overclocking session was the positive experience with the AI generated LN2 container. Usually 100 liter of liquid helium lasts us a couple hours at best. But with our new container, the supply lasted a day and a half! That’s mostly due to the responsiveness of the design which enables a must faster thermal transfer from the helium gas to the copper.
I’ll leave you now with a couple more pictures of the session and hopefully see you next time with Intel’s next generation CPU!
Picture Gallery
