Overclocking

Overclocking

With a little time and trial 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 4111 MHz (!) with a Thermalright MUX 120 air cooler. Here's what we did:

• Disable Turbo mode
• Set maximum processor multiplier
• Lower QPI divider
• Left Voltages at AUTO
• Set memory at a close to maximum stable memory frequency
• Now increase CPU base frequency

We maxed out at 24x171= 4111 MHz. Now I say maxed out here, but the processor and motherboard could have gone faster. We had to forfeit due to CPU temperatures getting completely out of control.

When we stress the CPU cores with prime 95, temperatures now rise to 98 Degrees C on one core (210F) which really is wahaaaay too high. Liquid cooling is probably the way to go if you pass 4 GHz, that or a very high-end CPU cooler.

We applied the XMS memory profile at the memory, increased it to CAS 9 and the 1600 MHz Corsair Dominator memory was now clocked stable at 1700 MHz. The end result .. a blazing fast PC (!)

The not so good then; we measure 369 Watt power consumption overclocked with all CPU cores stressed -- no GPU activity at all -- Yikes !