Gigabyte Burns $20,000 of Liquid Helium to hit 7.5GHz on 7740X

By Eric Hamilton Published June 08, 2017 at 7:04 pm

Hardware

Gigabyte recently sponsored an extreme overclocking event throughout Computex, where their resident overclockers HiCookie and Sofos teamed with TeamAU’s Dinos22, Youngpro, and SniperOZ. The teams worked to overclock the Intel i7-7740X KBL-X CPU on the new X299 platform.

Gigabyte’s team was able to hit the 7.5GHz mark with the i7-7740X, with the help of LHe (Liquid Helium) – allegedly $20,000 worth. To give some perspective, when we spoke off-camera with Der8auer at the GSkill booth, we learned that LHe costs him about $4.4 per second in his region. With the use of LHe, the team of overclockers were able to drop temperatures to -250° Celsius. Opposed to LN2, LHe has a boiling point of around -269° Celsius, meaning it can take temperatures far lower than LN2.

With the employed LHe, Gigabyte was able to set 4 launch day records in 3DMark03, 3DMark06, and Aquamark. All scores were achieved using the Intel i7-7740X and the Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion motherboard. Memory and GPUs diverge a bit for different benchmarks, as can be seen below.

Benchmark – CPU Frequency

Hardware

CPU: Intel i7-7740X

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 4333MHz

PSU: Corsair AX 1500i

Score Submission

Benchmark – 3DMark03 (World Record)

Hardware

CPU: Intel i7-7740X

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion

Graphics Card: Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 3600 C17

PSU: Corsair AX 1500i

Score Submission

Benchmark – 3DMark06 (World Record)

Hardware

CPU: Intel i7-7740X

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion

Graphics Card: Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 3600 C17

PSU: Corsair AX 1500i

Score Submission

Benchmark – Aquamark (World Record)

Hardware

CPU: Intel i7-7740X

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 3600 C17

PSU: Corsair AX 1500i

Score Submission

Benchmark – 3DMark06 (Global First Place)

Hardware

CPU: Intel i7-7740X

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299-SOC Champion

Graphics Card: 2x Aorus GeForece GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 3600 C17

PSU: Corsair AX 1500i

Score Submission

To learn a bit more about the i7-7740X, along with other Kaby Lake X and Skylake-X CPUs, as well as the X299 chipset, look over the preliminary information we obtained from Computex 2017.

Editorial: Eric Hamilton

Gigabyte Burns $20,000 of Liquid Helium to hit 7.5GHz on 7740X

Eric Hamilton

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