Overclocking

Overclocking

With a little time, trial and error you can certainly achieve a very high overclock. For this test run we overclocked an Intel Core i7 870. We get a nice 100% stable overclock, but we surely do need better cooling.

So with the Front Side Bus officially annihilated, things tend to change a little while overclocking a Nehalem based processor. Only a little though. It's a little weird but the concept remains the same. In the BIOS you'll find a 133 MHz register, the BASE CPU clock... read that as your 'FSB' to play around with. Of course, with an Extreme Edition processor, things would be much easier, unfortunately this is not the case with today's launched processors.

All three processors released today are multiplier locked, meaning your starting point is to select the highest possible multiplier in the BIOS and then increase that base clock

Core i7 870 overclocking

First up for this processor, check what your current maximum multiplier values are. We again fire off a much higher base clock to that multiplier of 22~24.

As such we where able to overclock the Core i7 870 processor to 4200 MHz (!) with a Thermalright MUX 120 air cooler. Here's what we did:

• Disable Turbo mode
• Set maximum processor multiplier
• Set QPI divider as close as possible to 6400 or very safe at 4800
• Set CPU Voltage at 1.45V
• lower memory at a close to maximum stable memory frequency
• Now increase CPU base frequency

The result was 24x175= 4200 MHz 100% stable ! Now I say maxed out here, but the processor and motherboard could have gone faster. We had to forfeit due to CPU temperatures getting out of control.

The not so good news then; we measure 290 Watt power consumption overclocked with all CPU cores stressed -- no GPU activity at all which you'd need to add during gaming. And we didn't even use 170W with the processor clocked and stressed at default clocks. So yeah, our overclock increased the TDP with another 120W.

Here you can see our overclock at 4200 MHz on the cheapo air cooler. That's just very impressive.