Intel Xeon W-3175X overclocked to 5.7 GHz breaks world record, 4.8 GHz with 360 mm radiator possible

The extreme overclocker Splave has achieved a new world record with the Intel Xeon W-3175X. For this it has overclocked the CPU to 5.7 GHz with LN2.

Intel Xeon W-3175X is very well clockable

With a 28 core processor, Intel teased a true processor monster at Computex last year. During a demonstration, in which the processor was overclocked to 5 GHz on all cores, the company made some mockery. During the demonstration it was concealed that a 1,770 Watt industrial cooler was necessary for the cooling.

A good year later, the Intel Xeon W-3175X came onto the market as an overclockable Xeon processor. With a price tag of $3,000 for the processor plus $1,800 for the motherboard, it’s not exactly a bargain. With a boost clock of up to 3.8 GHz, a base clock of 3.1 GHz and a hexa channel memory interface, this is indeed an extremely powerful processor, as the first tests have shown. Excitingly, even this extremely high-capacity processor can be properly overclocked – even without a liquid nitrogen cooler.

4.7 to 4.8 GHz possible with water cooler

The extreme overclocker Allen Golibersuch, better known under his scene name Splave, is one of the first who could work with the processor. He tested it in different scenarios and of course overclocked it. He also wrote all this down in an article at Tom’s Hardware. Especially interesting is that Splave overclocked the Xeon W-3175X without liquid nitrogen cooling. He succeeded in bringing all 28 cores to a clock rate of 4.7 to 4.8 GHz with a regular water block including a 360 mm radiator. The mainboard was the Asus ROG Dominus Extreme. But how much the processor heats up in the long run is a different matter. The Intel presentation at Computex 2018 was therefore not as exaggerated as initially assumed. This shows also the next overclocking attempts of Splave.

5.7 GHz with liquid nitrogen cooler, new wPrime world record

Splave also overclocked the processor with liquid nitrogen cooling during his tests. He found out that the Xeon W-3175X behaves similar to the Skylake-X processors, regarding the cold bug. The only disadvantage is that no soldered heatspreader is used as in the Skylake-X Refresh series. But the big heatspreader was a big advantage in general. In order to simulate an i9-9980XE, the extreme overclocker deactivated ten cores and could then easily clock the processor to 5.0 GHz with water cooling. With the i9-9980XE, only a good 4.9 GHz maximum is possible.

With all activated cores Splave succeeded in overclocking to 5.7 GHz with LN2 cooling. On this clock he was able to break the wPrime 1024m-Rekord. The new record is now 16.528 seconds. The extreme overclocker also measured the current consumption of the processor. The Asus ROG Dominus Extreme allows the connection of two power supplies that share the load very precisely. At 5.5 GHz, the mainboard with its 36 VRM phases already consumed 1,350 watts. With two power supply units, the load was divided exactly in half to 675 watts per power supply unit. Anyone who can afford such a processor and motherboard should usually be able to cope with the electricity costs.