The media embargo on the latest Intel Skylake-X processor lineup has officially lifted which means that today we have a plethora of reviews going online. Here’s a quick roundup from some of the web’s leading tech media. Let’s see what the general opinion is towards the new platform, particularly from the perspective of overclocking:

PC Perspective - ”With a core voltage of 1.28v I was able to push all cores to a 4.6 GHz and run the system mostly stable. However, temperatures at this point would spike to over 100C. I eventually settled on a 4.5 GHz overclock on all cores and a Vcore of 1.24v, which allowed the system to stabilize around 83C with our cooling setup. Even that is going to be high for a lot of users, but the performance advantages of running all 10-cores at 4.5 GHz should be around 10-12% on heavily threaded applications.”

Hot Hardware - ”The fundamentals for overclocking Kaby Lake X are similar to Skylake-X, but because of there are far fewer cores and a more robust power delivery mechanism on this new platform, it is easier to hit higher frequencies without leveraging extreme cooling or voltages. With the very same Corsair AIO cooler, and a bump in voltage to 1.33V, we took our Core i7-7740X all the way up to 5.3GHz, with complete stability and no throttling.”

Tom’s Hardware - “We now know that the Core i9-7900X’s performance to power consumption ratio turns negative as you utilize more of its on-die resources. We did manage to achieve a stable 4.8 GHz overclock under the single- and multi-core Cinebench R15 benchmarks. However, our cooling solution was probably the decisive factor there. Realistically, 4.5 GHz should be achievable with an all-in-one liquid cooler.”

Bit-Tech - ”There seems to be much more headroom with Skylake-X than its predecessor, and the main limiting factor is temperature if our CPU is anything to go by. We plumbed in 1.3V as a starting point and crept up from 4GHz all the way to an astounding 4.7GHz, which is 300MHz higher than we managed with the Core i7-6950X. Even more impressive was the fact that it was still completely stable with just 1.28V - far lower than the 1.44V we needed with the older CPU. However, temperatures were definitely a concern with Cinebench and Terragen pushing 100°C with our 240mm AIO liquid cooler.”

TweakTown - ”I was able to get a nice 4.6GHz on all cores, but of course, you might do better. I would say almost all CPUs can do 4.5GHz on all cores, and even then, the CPU is a monster. Overclocking memory on this platform is very easy, the IMC is very well tuned, and it seems that 3200MHz isn't the maximum any longer. Many motherboard vendors have been touting memory speeds over 4GHz, so we should see 3600MHz+ become the standard soon.”