Clock Frequencies

The following chart shows how well the processor sustains its clock frequency, and which boost clock speeds are achieved at various thread counts. This test uses a custom-coded application that mimics real-life performance—it is not a stress test like Prime95. Modern processors change their clocking behavior depending on the type of load, which is why we provide three plots with classic floating point math, SSE SIMD code, and the modern AVX vector instructions. Each of the three test runs calculates the same result using the same algorithm, just with a different CPU instruction set.



Now let's see what happens when we lift the chip's power limit from 125 W to the maximum.



As you can see, the chip sustains 4.6 GHz on all cores much better than before. We test each thread count for only around a minute, which means the effects of the power limit increase will be even bigger in many real-life scenarios, as our benchmarks on the previous pages show.

Overclocking

As mentioned before, the Core i7-11700KF has its multiplier unlocked—thanks to the "K" suffix, which means you're free to set any desired multiplier you want.

My highest really stable overclock turned out to be 4.9 GHz. I really wanted 5.0, but couldn't get it fully stable, no matter the voltage. While Windows and most apps would run fine all day, Prime95 stability testing showed errors within a few seconds.

Looking at the performance results, we can see that most scenarios do gain from the manual overclock, partly because the CPU actually barely reaches the promised 5.0 GHz boost, and rather ends up at 4.9 GHz most of the time at default with lightly threaded workloads.