Asus's Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard recently helpedto break overclocking records with Intel's latest high-end desktop CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K, pushing it all the way to 7.448 GHz while achieving a 12066 MT/s RAM overclock by using a unique liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling setup, featuring an cooler designed by Diabatix and manufactured by 3D Systems. The unique shape of the cooler is due to its intended use for liquid nitrogen overclocking, made to offset the natural Leidenfrost effect which can occur with LN2, forming undesired vapor layers.
This LN2 cooler, initially revealed in July, was partially designed by Diabatix' custom generative AI model and tested with 14th Gen Intel chips prior to being adopted for this Arrow Lake S overclocking run. It's noted as being capable of achieving a thermal resistance of 0.011K/W. LN2 cooling is a notoriously fickle and fragile process, which often means that it's difficult to sustain these workloads for truly practical lengths of time— but optimized solutions like this can allow the system to run more stably, for longer periods, and thus be pushed to yet farther heights.
In Asus' detailing of the overclocking process and results with the whole range of Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, it's noted that its overclockers managed to achieve "5 world records, 19 global first-place records and 31 first-place records" with the help of this cooling setup. The peaks are achieved with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, of course, with the prior-mentioned 7488.7 MHz overclock being done by Elmor and the paired 12066 MT/s RAM overclock being achieved by BenchMarc. The Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K are also pushed impressively far beyond their base levels of performance, but of course the high-end numbers are the most impressive when using such specialized LN2 cooling.
Besides the specialized cooling and CPU in use, the motherboard used to achieve all of this was the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Apex. While average consumers certainly won't have access to all this specialized overclocking equipment, these records do reflect positively on that particular motherboard, though like its predecessor, expect to pay a significant price premium for both the board and the rest of the components you'll need to make the most of it.
