Overclocking the processor

Overclocking the processor

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. After enabling manual overclocking 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 mainboard applies a dynamic multiplier. A baseclock of 133 MHz times a multiplier of 25 is 3.33 GHz. That is your base 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 do things simple, go into the BIOS and select the CPU level up function. With the Core i7 processors you can select 3.6 and 4.0 GHz, enable, save and reboot. And bam .. your OC is steady and running completely automatic. Make sure you have proper cooling of course

If you want to overclock extensively by hand, 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 1.35V on the processor and use a Noctua NH-D14 heatpipe cooler. We easily booted into Windows at ~4.0 GHz but it would just not remain stable.

We had to forfeit at roughly 3.9 GHz. The processor used is an older C0 revision. Anything over 4 GHz would result in instability no matter what we tried voltages and settings wise.