When we talk about extreme overclocking and world records using the latest CPUs, it's almost a no-brainer to think that this is achieved on flagship or high-end motherboards that cost hundreds of dollars, but what if an entry-level motherboard uses one of the fastest multi-threaded CPUs on the consumer market to set world records? The $110 B650 motherboard from ASRock achieves this goal.
We were shocked when we learned about this overclocking achievement from Canadian overclocking enthusiast Salty Croissant, who broke the world record for the highest performance of a 16-core chip using an ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 97950X 16-core CPU.
This overclocking was done under extreme cooling conditions such as liquid nitrogen, which allowed all core frequencies of the AMD Ryzen 97950X CPU to remain at 6.834GHz. Impressively, this was done on the ASRock B650M-HDV/M .2 is done on the motherboard, which uses a very simple 8+2+1 phase design, and normally we would expect to see such overclocking capabilities on ultra-high-end motherboards, as these motherboards have more VRMs than the ones on the B650M.
With the right settings, the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 was able to keep the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU running smoothly in the 7-ZIP benchmark, not only setting a 16-core CPU OC record, but also setting the fastest performance record for the CPU itself in that specific benchmark. The score is 306,686MIPS. Overclocking legends such as SPLAVE and SAFEDISK congratulated Salty on his achievement, and it appears this motherboard may be the most cost-effective motherboard in recent history.
This statement may be correct, because the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 is priced at only $110 at Microcenter, which fully demonstrates that we should not be suspicious of entry-level motherboards because of the price. There are hidden gems all around us, and this is yet another proof that the overclocking enthusiast space is helping people discover some amazing components for their latest PC builds.