What just happened? We know Intel's new flagship Core i9-13900K is a beast of a CPU, and now Asus has shown just what it's capable of with the right people and equipment. A team of overclockers has pushed the chip to over 9GHz, a new world record and making it the first processor to pass the 9GHz milestone.

Overclockers Jon Sandström, Pieter Plaiser, and their team set the record at an Asus office in Taiwan earlier this month. Using an open-bench system with an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard, the Core i9-13900K, which has a maximum boost of 5.8GHz, was pushed to 9.009GHz. It was able to run Pifast for 6.85 seconds and SuperPi 32M for 3 minutes, 3 seconds, and 778 milliseconds.

It's over 9000!!!!

ASUS overclockers broke the 9 GHz barrier, smashing their own previous CPU frequency record.

With that, the ROG Maximus Z790 Apex has 14 World Records, and 29 GFP scores, making it the Z790 record-breaking champion.🏆 @intel @IntelGaming pic.twitter.com/hVs4uJTqdb

— ROG Global (@ASUS_ROG) December 21, 2022

The team achieved its world record, which now tops the HWBOT charts, by disabling all of the Core i9-13900K's Efficient cores and hyperthreading, leaving only the eight Performance cores and eight threads.

Unsurprisingly, the chip reached its record-breaking speed using liquid nitrogen (LN2), though, in this instance, it was combined with liquid helium to bring the temperature first down to -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8 Fahrenheit) before pushing it to -250.2°C (-418.36 degrees Fahrenheit).

Back in October, the Core i9-13900K chip broke the overclocking world record by reaching 8.8GHz, moving ahead of the 8.7 GHz (8,722.78 MHz) reached by AMD's FX-8370 that had been unbeaten for almost a decade.

We called the Intel Core i9-13900K hot and hungry in our review of the current Raptor Lake flagship, awarding it a disappointing score of 75.

It'll certainly be interesting to see if the overclocking record will be broken again when the Intel Core i9-13900KS arrives next year. There's expected to be a special edition version of the CPU that can reach 6GHz without requiring manual tuning.

The Intel Core i9-13900KS actually appears in the overclocking video—unlikely to be an accident on Intel's part—in a CPU-Z listing where the product name is the Core i9-13900K, suggesting the KS version is a pre-binned model. As per VideoCardz, the chip is shown with a Max TDP of 150W, though this is just the Processor Base Power (PL1), so the Max Turbo Power (MTP/PL2) will likely be higher. For comparison, the Core i9-13900K has a base TDP of 125W and a max TDP of 253W.