In a move that asserts Intel's undisputed leadership over the PC microprocessor market, Intel senior performance analyst François Piednoel conducted a special exhibition at the CES 2009 event, where he demonstrated the Core i7's overclocking and resulting performance potential employing water cooling. The water-cooled Intel Core i7 reached speeds in excess of 4.60 GHz, proving it has better overclocking potential than AMD's Phenom II X4 when water-cooled.

The setup included an Intel Core i7 sample seated on an Intel "Smackover" DX58SO motherboard. The motherboard was backed by Intel's own desktop control-center software that provides software-level performance management and monitoring. The processor's vCore was set at 1.44V, with the northbridge set at 1.21V. The clock speed of 4.61 GHz was achieved with a bus speed of 144 MHz with a multiplier value of 32x. Temperatures recoded showed the CPU chugging along at 61 °C, with the CPU VRM at 31 °C and the X58 chipset at 41 °C. The feat shows Core i7 to be the better CPU to overclock when water-cooling is used, while an Intel Core i7 is yet to reach 6.2+ GHz speeds, just for the kicks.

You know we always try to share with you all these crazy world records and overclocking attempts that happen in a global scale, and today we have one more to show. Overclockers Vince "k|ngp|n" Lucido and Peter Tan "Shamino" have united to break the 40k barrier in 3DMark Vantage, an astonishing accomplishment. Except these two man, behind this record hides an Intel X58 platform. The motherboard used was a standard EVGA X58 SLI running BIOS SZ1C combined with an LN2 cooled Core i7 965 at 5110MHz (even running on higher core speeds as you'll see down below). Memory used was a Kingston 3GB HyperX DDR3 2000MHz CL9 kit clocked at 1080MHz with timings of CL8-7-7-21. Finally, the GPUs of choice were two volt-modded EVGA GTX 295+ working in Quad-SLI, cooled by LN2 again. The new official 3DMark Vantage world record was set for the Performance segment with a properly calculated score of P40398 marks. To find more about the whole overclocking process and the hardware used, please click here.