Overclocking

Overclocking the extreme series processor can be a little bit of a daunting task when compared to the Core i7 920. There is the multiplier for the cores to adjust, as well as the base clock. In order to effectively overclock a chip such as this, maximum stable overclocks were achieved as a multiplier only overclock, a base clock only overclock, and then a mix of the two. The first overclocked netted me an overclock to 4.1GHz with the multiplier at 31x and the core voltages at 1.45 V. There was additional tweaking performed with memory latency and QPI voltages, which were mainly performed to maintain the stability at the higher clock speeds. The second overclock was performed with a straight overclock of the base clock which only allowed a stable overclock to 3.9GHz. No matter what was tweaked with voltages and memory timings, there was not anything higher than 3.9GHz that maintained stability. The third overclock got me to about 3.9GHz as well, before stability became an issue. These various overclocks allowed me to determine the best course of action in overclocking this CPU while maintaining stability, which happened to be through multiplier increases alone with the final overclock being at 4.1GHz. It should be noted that with additional cooling performance increases for the motherboard components, as well as the CPU, higher voltages would have been able to have been utilized which would allow for additional increases to the multiplier, and thus the overclock.

World Bench

PCMark Vantage