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.

Overclocking

Overclocking was really a tough nut on the Core i9-11900K. While I could boot at 5.1 GHz, it never was stable, not even with 1.5 V. So I settled for 5 GHz, which was easy enough, with just 1.4 V.

Unfortunately, this means that there really is no point to manual overclocking. Just increasing the power limit will yield you better performance while offering perfect stability. Also, Adaptive Boost can work on top of that.