6.3 GHz Ryzen 9 9700X beats 7.1 GHz Core i9-14900KF in liquid nitrogen AVX showdown

LN2 overclocker Skatterbencher has taken AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X to new heights, beating a 7.1GHz Core i9-14900KF in OCCT with nearly a 1 GHz deficit clock speed. The overclocker broke the OCCT AVX benchmark world record with a score of 269.35 points on AMD's latest Zen 5 8-core chip.

The world record-breaking result was achieved at just 6.318 GHz on the Ryzen 7 9700X. To get the Zen 5 chip to that speed, SkatterBencher used a host of techniques, rather than inputing a manual multiplier and voltage. Skatterbencher used a combination of BCLK overclocking, Precision Boost Overdrive, AMD's Curve Optimizer (with a positive offset), and Curve Shaper to enable Ryzen's Precision Boost algorithm to run at well over 6GHz on liquid nitrogen.

With a score of 269.35 points, the Ryzen 7 9700X outscored Intel's flagship Core i9-14900KF in the same benchmark, clocked at 7.1GHz on liquid nitrogen. The Core i9's score was 14 points lower than the Zen 5 equivalent, despite operating at an 800MHz higher clock speed.

However, in the SSE version of the benchmark, the 9700X wasn't as strong. In OCCT's SSE benchmarks, the 9700X was not able to outperform the 14900KF, featuring a score of 127.79 points, 8.76 points behind the Raptor Lake CPU.

In other benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 9700X was able to reach 1,003 points in CPU-Z 2017.1's single-core benchmark and 10,805 points in the multi-core counterpart. Skatterbencher was also able to push the 9700X to 6.8GHz by disabling SMT, enabling the 9700X to hit the highest CPU frequency on the CPU-Z validator over the last 12 months. In Geekbench 6, SkatterBencher was able to hit a single core result of 3,902 points and a multi-core result of 21,135 points at 6.3 GHz.

SkattterBencher's LN2 scores show the strengths of AMD's Zen 5 architecture, namely its beefier AVX-512 optimizations. Zen 5 is the first AMD architecture to boast a full throughput AVX-512 pipeline, boosting AVX-512 performance over Zen 4. Intel on the other hand does not have any AVX-512 support on its 13th or 14th Gen chips, relegating the i9-14900KF to using AVX and/or AVX2 instructions for the OCCT test. This is most certainly the reason why the 9700X was able to outpace the i9-14900KF at such a severe clock speed disadvantage.