What just happened? Overclocking enthusiast der8auer recently took a trip to Intel's OC lab in Portland, Oregon. During his visit, he was allowed to see how far he could push Chipzilla's new Core i9-13900HK mobile CPU. The results are impressive and did not take much work to achieve, although there are a few footnotes to be aware of.
Using an internal Intel tool called ROC (short for real time overclocking) along with prototype hardware, der8auer was able to push the 13900HK to 6.0GHz with relative ease before it locked up. That's pretty impressive for a mobile chip although again, he was using prototype hardware and software.
der8auer described ROC as a slim version of Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) that's very intuitive, lean and clean. ROC is not available to the public and unfortunately, der8auer said he is unsure if that will ever change.
The air cooling solution on the CPU is also beefier than what you would typically find stuffed in a laptop (but still nothing super impressive compared to a high end desktop cooler), so keep that in mind. Still, der8auer said it is the highest frequency he is aware of for a mobile chip.
A couple of months back, der8auer struggled to hit 5.6GHz on a notebook CPU with dry ice.
As you willl see, the reference validation platforms featured in the video are arguably more interesting than the overclocking itself. The first custom board we are shown is overflowing with unique features not found on consumer motherboards including a hot-swappable chipset that can be replaced without having to flash the BIOS, a one DIMM per channel memory configuration, and unprecedented access to the CPU.
It is also interesting that Intel uses BGA chips instead of LGA processors for validation testing.
der8auer said that in addition to this video, he has already shot two other segments and is planning on doing at least one more. If you are at all interested in hardware happenings, you won't regret the 17-minute investment.