There have been loads of reports that the retail version of the new Kaby Lake 7600K and 7700K, are unable to overclock to 5GHz or higher. We decided to check out the claims.
Last week, we reviewed the Gigabyte GA-Z270X Ultra Gaming motherboard, which we thought was a very good motherboard offering decent performance and tons of features. We used this motherboard to overclock our Intel Core i5-7600K (retail version) to see how far it could go … Let’s find out!
True enough, the claims was right. During our prelimary tests, we were unable to overclock the 7600K to 5Ghz or higher. It would post and boot up with no issues at 5GHz, but fail to load into Windows. The highest I was able to reach was 4.9GHz.
Test Setup
For our tests, we used a test rig which included the components below. All tests were conducted at overclocked clock speeds of 4.9GHz at a resolution of 1920×1080. High or Ultra settings enabled.
| CPU | Intel Core i5-7600K (Kaby Lake) |
| Cooling | Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-Z270X Ultra Gaming |
| Ram | 2 x 4GB G.Skill Trident-Z DDR4-3200 |
| XMP 2.0 profiles | Memory timings : 15-15-15-35 @1.2v |
| HDD | Adata XPG SX930 – 240GB |
| PSU | Thermaltake Toughpower RGB 750W |
| VGA card | Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Edition 8GB GDDR5 |
| Nvidia Drivers | Latest GeForce Drivers v.378.49 – WHQL |
| OS | Windows 10 |
Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed, so the results may vary depending on certain conditions and various hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what are you doing. High voltages may damage hardware and it will not be covered by warranty.
CPU-Z Information
We managed to overclock the Core i5-7600K to a whopping 4.9GHz with no issues whatsoever. However, the voltage increase was extremely high @ 1.5V !!
PCMark 8
PassMark 8
Cinebench R15
HyperPi 32M
3DMark Time Spy
Full Load Temps @ 4.9GHz
Full load temps at 4.9GHz wasn’t that impressive, but we expected that. At 80 degrees Celisus, it’s not something I want to have running 24/7.
It proves that Kaby Lakes run HOT when overclocked. We recommend watercooling if you plan to overclock beyond the “Turbo Boost” speed of 4.2GHz for the 7600K.
At the end of the day, I’ve pretty impressed with the overall overclocking ability of the 7600K … remember, it’s only a Core i5, with 6Mb cache, 4 cores and only rated to run at 3.8GHz. To get a extra 1.1 GHz (or 1,100 MHz) overclock … I’ll go for that any day!
