Overclocking Tests
We went about overclocking the old-fashioned way by raising the under-load juice to 1.375V and all-core frequency until it could no longer complete a 15-minute Blender test.
One quickly realises that overclocking is a fine line between frequency, power and temperature, and our single-fan Noctua NH-D15, used in all tests and therefore a consistency marker, managed to keep the chip running at a 4.375GHz all-core speed with temps hovering around 98°C. There was no indication of throttling.
Swapping out to an AMD-provided NZXT Kraken X62-02 all-in-one watercooler gave us a stable 4.4GHz at 93°C, though the results presented below are from the Noctua air-cooled setup.
Power consumption rises from a system-wide 204W to 313W, indicating just how much more power is being pushed through the socket, but if every last morsel of performance counts, hitting over 10K in Cinebench R20's default multi-core test is breaking new ground for a mainstream-socket processor.