The official Rocket Lake launch isn’t even here yet, but professional overclockers are already pushing the Core i9 11900K past 7GHz. As Tweeted by APISAK, one overclocker called ‘ROG-Fisher’ so far has achieved this overclock on a ROG Maximus XIII Apex motherboard with a crazy-high voltage of 1.873v. That makes this score the highest frequency overclock on Rocket Lake–at least for right now.

Another overclocker in India has already begun work overclocking a 11900K. But for now, they have ‘only’ achieved 6.5Ghz, at a much lower vcore of 1.678v.

This is just the beginning for Rocket Lake. It will take time for overclockers to feel out these new chips to see where they can be pushed.

At least, for now, 7GHz seems to be the clock speed barrier to beat with liquid nitrogen cooling. Compare that to Intel’s Comet Lake-S chips, which could hit well in excess of 7GHz. In-fact, with one CPU-Z validation, one overclocker almost hit the 8GHz mark.

However, with Rocket Lake being the first-brand new architecture from Intel in over 5 years (and one of the only backported architectures), it makes us wonder if Rocket Lake will have any extra frequency headroom from the changes Intel has made to the architecture (compared to Comet Lake). Only time will tell.

For more details on Rocket Lake, check out our coverage here. The official Rocket Lake launch is tomorrow so stay tuned for our review. Perhaps we’ll see chips like the 11900K join the ranks as some of the best CPUs you can buy in 2021. And ‘can buy’ might be a key consideration. Given that Intel fabs its own CPUs, it seems unlikely the chip giant will suffer the same stock issues that have plagued AMD since the Ryzen 5000 launch last year.