Overclocking Core i7 980X
Overclocking Core i7 980X
With the Front Side Bus officially annihilated, things tend to change a little in the overclocking department. 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 called the Base clock; look at that as your 'FSB' to play around with. Of course, if you have an Extreme Edition processor, things are much easier. Just play around with CPU voltages and the multiplier and even on the stock air cooler you can achieve some pretty snazzy results.
First up, check what your current values are. The Intel X58 mainboard applies a dynamic multiplier. A baseclock of 133 MHz times a multiplier of 25 is 3.33 GHz. That is your clock frequency.
In the default configuration however, it can also apply a multiplier of 26 with Turbo mode enabled. So your Core i7 processor will go beyond spec at default already.
Now if you want to overclock extensively, first off in the BIOS please disable Speedstep, C1E and TM functions preventing the processor from clocking down or up dynamically based on diverse variables including heat and CPU load.
We now simply increase the multiplier until the system crashes, then increase voltages and start over again. Inevitably we'll find our maximum frequency or temperatures simply get out of hand.
For our overclock we increase voltages towards 1.42V on the processor and use a Zalman Reserator XT liquid cooling unit. It easily booted into Windows at ~4.0 GHz with the Core i7 980X processor.
At that time, temperatures started to slowly grow but we ended at a 100% stable 4.4 GHz. That is a baseclock of 133 MHz with a 33 MP. Overclocking itself, a pretty easy thing to achieve with this processor. Bear in mind that overclocking draws much more power from your system and also take into consideration that your cooling solution needs to be proper as going from four to six cores should produce more heat.
At 4.4 GHz with all six cores on the CPU stressed (not GPU) we utilize roughly 360 Watts (6 cores + 6 HT stressed 100%). Check out the stress test.
So here you can see the processor clocked at 4400 MHz. We applied a 1.42 Voltage in order to maintain stability with extreme CPU stress. On this setup temps peaked to 75 degrees C / 168F and that's really the maximum you want to go. But sure, we just squeezed another 1+ GHz out of each of the six cores for free man.
