
This is why the term “ silicon lottery” is thrown out so commonly in the CPU/GPU/RAM overclocking communities. One of the biggest factors is the CPU’s quality of silicon. How much the CPU can be overclocked depends on a lot of factors. However, you could push that boost clock to a much higher value with overclocking.

In other words, it won’t exceed that clock rate, no matter which video game or workload you throw at it. For example, AMD’s Ryzen 5600X processor has a maximum boost clock of 4.6 GHz.

Every processor comes out of the factory with a default clock speed. Overclocking at its base is pretty simple to understand.
