ASRock, with the help of legendary overclocker Splave have used their new W790 WS to take Intel's Sapphire Rapids based Xeon w7-2495X as high as 5.3 GHz to grab a pile of first place global performance scores on HWBOT. In total they've secured 14 global records in the 24-core category, and 18 more records in the w7-2495X hardware category. What is perhaps slightly more impressive is that they managed to exceed the officially supported DDR5-4800 by 2000 MT/s, achieving a frequency of 3400 MHz (6800 MT/s) with a CAS Latency of 32. The results were all produced with a custom water cooled configuration, with many benchmarks needing below 5 GHz clocks to remain stable enough for validation, so there is certainly room for higher scores under more exotic cooling solutions.

One of the more interesting details presented in the screenshots of certain benchmark results such as Y-Cruncher and Cinebench R15 is the gargantuan power draw exhibited by the w7-2495X. With a rated Vcore of 1.22v the 24-core sucks down over 500 W. We have already seen the 56-core w9-3495X pull a full kilowatt in early overclocking sessions, so the power draw here is not entirely without merit. Needless to say while Intel is finally offering a compelling HEDT lineup of unlocked processors, you may not necessarily be able to squeeze much out of them before tripping your breakers. As for ASRock's records it's still early days for the new Xeon W lineup and there will be a revolving door of world record holders before the final ounce of performance is squeezed from these chips.In their blog post announcing the records, ASRock follows Intel's guidance in that their W790 WS motherboard is officially designed for workstations, despite the overclocking prowess on display. They reiterate details about the board, that it features up to 2 TB DDR5 ECC RDIMM support, PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, USB4/Thunderbolt 4 and Dual 10 Gbps Ethernet ports. They also mention the more important point to the overclocking numbers, and that's the 14-layer PCB and 20+2 phase CPU VRM. Though whether that's actual phase counts or with doublers, hard to say for sure. What is certain is that these records will serve as temporary ice breakers as more people receive their shiny new toys and have a chance to take their shot at these benchmarks.

You can find the full list of Xeon w7-2495X records here. For more information about the ASRock W790 WS you can visit the site here.