 For years, Intel has discouraged the notion that golden samples of their processors even exist. And yet, here I am in a video sponsored by Intel holding nothing other than......a golden sample. And it gets even better because Intel sent over a second very special package. A cryogenic cooler that they claim can be used to chill a chip like their golden sample to subambient temperatures and help it reach frequencies as high as 5.6 to 5.8 GHz in gaming workloads. And it gets even better again because we've got a stream coming up where you'll get a chance to win one of these combo packs. You will find more details linked below. You know, I don't know what's up with like this scrappy new attitude over at Intel, but I like it. Let's go for a test drive, ladies and gentlemen. CPU go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! The Cortex-A10900K On the surface, there's nothing unusual about the Core i9-10900K inside this golden foil wrapper. 10 cores, 20 threads, 3.7 gigahertz base, 5.3 gigahertz max boost, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But on the inside is a piece of silicon that was hand-picked by Intel's engineers as a shining example of the absolute best their 14 nanometer process is capable of. Now these kits were actually created for LTX this year, hence the packaging. RIP. But it's just as well, because a little more time in the kitchen has turned into a far more interesting experience. Let's shift our focus for a moment then to what the heck is a cryo cooler? There are two partners that Intel worked with to develop these things. Cooler Master created this, a pre-filled AIO style unit, while EK went the custom loop route. The EK solution is actually what we used in our fastest gaming PC in the world for now video. And that's how we were gaming at 5.4 gigahertz with all cores. So let's start with an unboxing of this puppy. First things first, you've got a triple radiator. So far nothing especially cryo looking about that. Three 120 millimeter fans, it's all pretty normal. We've got actually what looks like a pretty beefy pump, especially for an AIO. Like it's nothing for like a custom loop, but that looks fairly considerable. All right, that's kind of non-standard connection on there. And then, ah, oh, now this, this is where the magic happens. Inside the CPU block is a custom thermoelectric cooling or tech module that draws about 200 Watts of power using an eight pin PCI express power connector. For the uninitiated tech cooling takes place when an electric current passes through a thermocouple causing heat to be absorbed on one side and then to be output on the other side. The more powerful the Peltier, the more cooling you get, but also the more heat you have to deal with. Hence the need for a triple radiator. Now on a normal CPU only AIO cooler, like the Corsair one that I'm pulling out of this system, a triple rad is kind of overkill. On the cryo cooler, it's pretty much a necessity as we're going to see. And there are some other considerations. You probably noticed that even though the Cooler Master Master Liquid ML360 Sub-Zero has a separate pump, the CPU block unit is too large to account for just adding a thermoelectric cooling module in there. That's because there's a shroud to prevent humid air from contacting the cold surface here. There's a freaking humidity sensor to help manage condensation, yes, my friends. And there's a power control and monitoring board that communicates with Intel's cryo cooler software. It's not the greatest mount for the pump, but I did manage to kind of screw it into the top of a fan. It's more intended for like a slit like this or an empty 120 millimeter fan mount where you could just put the thumb screws through the mount into the like threaded bracket. But hey, it's on there. Y'all wanna go Sub-Zero with me? We've already applied the BIOS update that we're gonna need for the cryo cooler. So all that's left is to throw on our XMP profile and fire up windows. In order to avoid any potential for bottlenecks, this system is loaded up with 5,100 megahertz RAM from Crucial as well as an RTX 3090 that's actually on its own completely separate water cooling loop. So Intel told me to expect temps as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius in unregulated mode, but recommended sticking with cryo mode for daily driver operation. Cryo mode uses CPU telemetry data to avoid unnecessary power draw and tells the cryo cooler if something's improperly mounted or something. Intel did mention that only 10th and 11th gen and onward CPUs are designed to provide that feedback. Although technically you could use the cryo cooler with anything you wanted, as long as you made the necessary modifications to the condensation shroud. Yo, whoa! Now let's talk about another thing Intel's been cooking up called OC thermal velocity boost. Regular thermal velocity boost already existed and it's just a higher level of turbo frequency that your CPU can gear up into when it's running cool enough. It's the OC part that's new. So get this, in a highly unusual move. Is that competition I smell? Intel is adding this feature to existing silicon with a microcode update, allowing users to adjust the factory thresholds for thermal velocity boost using their XTU overclocking utility. All right, so why don't we have a look at the software? First of all, there's the cryo software, which is very simple. Okay, so they're standby, cryo and unregulated. I mean, should we just fool around with unregulated mode first and see what kind of temps we see? Oh, we're down to 16, wait, 43 degrees. What is it doing? 10 degrees, what's going on here, Intel? It's definitely working. These wires right here that go from the top of the unit where the power goes in, down to presumably where the tech is. Yeah, down at the base. These are warm. And our CPU temps are looking pretty interesting as well. Check this out. We've already dropped down to zero degrees Celsius. Now it's not letting me go below zero degrees, which is interesting. I would guess because of the climate that we're in and the local humidity. Yeah, dew point, 9.8, and the cooler is actually at minus 10. Now let's pull out the old thermal camera and have a quick looky-boo here. You can see the warm cable. Everything up here is pretty cool, pretty normal looking. Radiator's not super toasty. Oh, interesting. We can see the hot side of our tech module through this grill here. And then we can actually see how chilly things are right around the CPU socket. That's actually one of the bigger concerns with running in unregulated mode. Not necessarily that you're gonna get condensation on the cooler itself, because you've got that little shroud on it to keep warm air away from it, but rather that the board itself might have air going across it that is going to cause condensation. So we can see this even more clearly around the back. That is freaking chilly. Well below ambient temps. Now let's have a look at the interface. Nicholas already ran some before numbers, both with the CPU running at stock speeds, as well as with his own sort of conservative attempt at using thermal velocity boost overclocking. But Intel sent me over what they call a starting point recipe for our golden chip that they're hoping will give us 5.6 or maybe even 5.8 gigahertz in games. It's not the most user-friendly thing ever. 56 multiplier. Dang, that feels crazy to even put in. Four core, 56. So then 55 and then 54. So they want 5.4 gigahertz all core, 5.6, four core. Huh. Well, we applied it. Oh yeah, any voltage things? Oh, I need 1.45 volts adaptive. Turbo boost short max power should be good. Well, my understanding is this is a very new feature. Whoopsie daisies. Well, that's what you get for not changing all your voltage settings and stuff before overclocking to 5.6 gigahertz. Good luck everybody. Apply. Is it running faster? Oh, yes, it is definitely. I saw it boost past 5.3 for a second there. Idle temps look good. Right in that 12, 13 degree range, about five degrees below ambient temperature right now. All right, thank you for the coil line RTX 3090. Love you. Oops, whoops. Oh, bloody hell. We're one round in. Let's tab out. And what did we see in here? 5.4 max. Okay. Do we wanna try a more extreme recipe? Okay. Okay, everything else here is the same. We're just going for 5.7 on loads up to, you know what? No, forget it. 5.8 up to two cores, 5.7 up to four. See if, you know, golden sample one of 200 can do it. Start with 1.475 volts. Okay. Well, let's do 485. Yeah, we definitely have cores that are seeing 5.5 gigahertz. I'm pretty sure this is more performance. We're seeing anywhere from 370 to 380. I'm even touching 390 FPS from time to time. It might just be working. Highest clock speed seen, 5.5 gigahertz throughout that run, but every core touched it. Whoa, hey, now that we're out of game, we just saw 5.7 gigahertz on three of the cores. What that tells us then is that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is more like a five to six core load, at least with whatever we've got running in the background, which frankly isn't much other than our monitoring tools. So what I'm gonna do now then, given that that is stable, is Nicholas is gonna run us through all the benchmarks that he ran before, and we'll get you that comparative data. The results are in, and this is fascinating, guys. We ended up needing about 1.5 volts to reach 5.7 gigahertz. And this is a real lesson in optimizing your overclock, because more voltage means, of course, more heat, and especially combined with the extra 200 watts from our tech, that's a lot for even a triple radiator to manage. So in CSGO, for example, we actually got our best result from Nicholas's lighter overclock at a lower voltage. You can see that his 99th percentile frames, so that's the slowest 1% of frames that the system is outputting, were actually about 10% faster with cryo cooling, but not pushed to the limit. Doom Eternal, on the other hand, shows us exactly what this kind of cooling is capable of in a best case scenario. Going from a stock CPU on a triple water cooler all the way up to 5.7 gigahertz, we went from 184 to 222 FPS, even if it did ultimately end up running about 20 degrees hotter than the conservative, more lightly overvolted attempt. As for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it didn't end up being particularly CPU limited in general. So this shows us a really good mix of games that will either benefit a little bit in certain situations, benefit a ton, or potentially not benefit at all. Of course, a few more FPS in lightly threaded loads like games isn't going to mean much if the whole thing falls apart when you fire up a workload that exceeds the 230-ish watt limit of the cryo cooler block. So does it fall apart? Over the course of an extended test, we found that while our system performance was on par with a regular triple AIO, our temps were significantly higher, which is a bit of a downer considering that a cryo cooler is expected to cost about twice as much as a regular AIO cooler. With that said, not everybody runs extended all core loads, and it should be noted that this is a very first generation attempt. From talking to Intel about it, the cryo cooler initiative is actually less of a random one-off project by a handful of nerdy engineers than I expected. Although it should be noted, the engineers were undoubtedly delightfully nerdy, and they consider it to be more of a first step towards helping mainstream users achieve the kind of off-the-wall frequencies that they'd normally only see from hardcore overclockers. Now the timing of Intel's interest in squeezing extra performance out of their near red line flagship CPU is definitely a little sus, as the kids say. But for my part, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and in my opinion, the enthusiast community should support initiatives like this in hopes that we see more of them. On the subject of support, that was one area that I told Intel I would like to see them do better. The reason traditional overclocking, you know, where you just set an all core ratio and increase the CPU voltage is still so popular is because it's simple. This kind of overclocking, where you're setting individual core frequencies under various loads and at various temperature thresholds with various offsets is not simple. And one of the biggest challenges is validation. With a normal all core overclock, it's easy to tell if the system is stable. You just run a stress test overnight and see if it errors out. But if Intel wanted this to get to the point where let's say a Puget systems or Origin PC is gonna ship a pre-overclocked cryo gaming PC to a customer, they need to create the tools that will help test single dual multi-core workloads with and without AVX offsets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and simultaneously monitor die temps, power use, frequency and stability. That way everyone from a system integrator to an end user can know with confidence that if they get a blue screen down the road, it's because of a driver update or something and not because their CPU flew too close to the sun. So bottom line, I am enthused to see more dials for enthusiasts to play with and very excited to see where the roadmap for coolers based on this tech leads us. Pun definitely intended. If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out one of our previous attempts at sub zero cooling. I'll tell you guys, this is significantly more elegant and quieter.