Running as in stable or running as in 'software overclock it and take a quick screenshot of cpu-z before it crashes'? and how many cores?
What makes the 2500K/2600K both so impressive is that they are actually fully stable at 4.6ghz+ and those are with your average retail chips and not cherry picked ones.
Why not watch it or read the thread, its at 4.8Ghz, thats no the max the chip would do, it was running haven looped IIRC and it was all the cores.
As said when they actually tried to find the limits the lowest chip hit 5Ghz all cores, the highest 5.5Ghz, these weren't really cherry picked, they just had 60 chips and to get the record they just tested a bunch and basically picked out the lowest vid ones, as in, in socket, stick a heatsink on top, boot, whack to 5Ghz on modest voltage, get a pile of 8 chips and move on to ln2, etc, etc. THere wasn't 20 hours of testing in a AMD lab to find the one that does the highest speed at the lowest voltage. I forget the numbers, the 4th chip they tried hit the record, the others all did 8Ghz, thats pretty exceptional.
Normally records are done by testing dozens of chips for a lot longer, very often in daft conditions like in alaska in mid winter with the windows open and the like.
Also no it has no direct relevance to how you'd run a system 24/7, I've said that several times, I think everyone has, when did anyone claim it did, thats why they tested on what is very cheap watercooling, top air cooling, cheap phase change and the absolute best cooling you can possible produce.
But think of it like this, Phenom 2, max on air for almost all chips at later steppings, 3.8Ghz, on water, a bit but not much more, on phase, whatever it is, I don't know, and on ln2, 6.4-6.6Ghz I think.
The hexcore Phenoms which were another stepping with some seriously good power characteristics you were pushing a tiny bit higher on air, and just under 7Ghz on all cores under LN2.
Now we see that Bulldozer will probably max out around 5.5Ghz on the best chips on air(at least with early steppings, theres probably headroom on the process and they are switching to 28nm next year, so very soon), 6GHz on phase(though it was fairly weak phase by the looks of it, not a fancy phase change system), and 8-8.4Ghz on silly cooling. We're looking at anything between 1 and 2 ghz higher on any particular type of cooling really, 4Ghz on air for Phenom 2, 5.5Ghz for Bulldozer, how much more competitive would Phenom 2 be if every chip hit 5.5Ghz and had 4 more cores....... pretty damn good they'd be.
In itself, not particularly useful, but knowing the range of clocking and comparing to other chips, it gives you a helpful full picture of its scaleability and overclocking potential, that IS useful. Ultimately its the same chip, land speed records aren't done in Mini's and have utterly no relevance, the chip you and I will be able to buy, with enough cooling will do 8Ghz +, even if you can't ever get it that fast, it pretty much shows where we might end up on high end watercooling, the chip scales very well with both voltage and temps.
