Core i7 870 overclocking

Overclocking

With a little time and trial you can certainly achieve an okay overclock. For this test run we overclocked a Core i7 870. The overclock you'll see is 100% stable.

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... look at 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 this processor.

The Core i7 870 is 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.

As such we were able to overclock the Core i7 870 processor to 3734 MHz with a Thermalright MUX 120 air cooler. Here's what we did:

• Disable Turbo mode
• Set maximum processor multiplier
• Increase processor voltage a little bit to with 0.2 Volts
• Lower memory multiplier to maximum stable memory frequency
• Increase CPU base frequency

The problem with the ECS BIOS is that you can not lower the QPI divider and thus frequency, that will hinder you in high BASECLOCK based overclocks (great wording eh?). We maxed out at 22x 169.7= 3734 MHz.

When we stress the CPU cores with Prime 95, temperatures now rise to 78 degrees C (172F) which really is decent enough, yet also your absolute maximum. Not bad for a heatpipe based cooler though!