8 - What about overclocking

Overclocking

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 .. 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. 133x24 is ~ 3.2 GHz. In the default configuration it however can also apply a 25 MP when stressed. So your Core i7 processor will go beyond spec at default already. See above, at default configuration your 3.2 GHz clocked product will do 3333 MHz just as well.

Now we simply increased the multiplier until either the system crashes or temperatures get out of hand. We did not increase voltages at all, yet on stock air cooler easily booted into windows at 3.6 GHz with the Core i965 processor. As you can see, the temperatures started to worry me so this is where we halted. However with better cooling, the results will be shocking. We'll actually show you this in our separate X58 review.

But overclocking itself, a pretty easy thing to achieve.