Earlier at Computex 2025, overclocker Pieter “SkatterBencher” Plaisier broke the GPU frequency world record during a live overclocking session courtesy of G.Skill’s event on the show floor. In his blog post, he explained the process of breaking the record previously held by NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 GPU.
GPU Frequency Record On A CPU
The unusual part of this overclocking run, however, is that it doesn’t involve any desktop GPU; instead, it’s the tiny integrated graphics within Intel’s Core Ultra 285K that pulled off this feat. As such, the overclocking attempt required some workarounds, including cooling down further as the chip scales better with temperature rather than voltage itself.
Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. Cooling the chip too far and some components within the chip may not work at all, and in this case, the SoC tile below -100°C will sometimes cause the system to not boot up. Ultimately, the integrated graphics was overclocked to 4.25GHz – the maximum clock possible with the 85x GT ratio derived from the chip’s 100MHz SOC reference clock (which is halved then multiplied by the set ratio).
Unlike most frequency-related records that usually lasts a fraction of a second, this chip is surprisingly stable even at such extreme clock speeds. Skatterbencher managed to run all the benchmarks while the iGPU is clocked at 3.9GHz, paired with tuned DDR5-8600 memory, along with 1.6V voltage operating at -160°C. In the results, most benchmarks showed nearly doubling of performance.
Overclocking beyond 4GHz was found to be negligible, however, as it is suspected that the interconnect within Intel’s chip may be the bottleneck, which means performance no longer improves beyond this clock speed. Still, fine tuning the reference clock does push the chip ever so slightly closer to its practical limits, and it’s fairly obvious to say that this is more of an overclocking exercise than something you’ll be doing at home; this attempt does prove that not all overclocking records has to come from the most powerful chip available on the market, though.
Pokdepinion: It’s going to be interesting seeing GPU frequency records full of Intel CPUs.
