Reaching new heights - Overclocking

Reaching new heights - Overclocking

With so much ridiculous horsepower in the system, (an engineering sample we must add) we could not resist trying out overclocking. We're keeping it simple, but anything over Gulftown on LCS (roughly 4.2 GHz) is a win in our book for this six-headed beast.

Pretty much we need to take a couple of steps if we want to overclock. Invest in good hardware by the way, the cheaper motherboards often are not well tuned for enthusiast overclocking.

Manual overclocking
The true guru3d audience overclocks from the BIOS and tries to find the maximum stable limit. The generic overclock procedure for multiplier based overclocking is as follows (this can differ a little per motherboard but the idea is the same):

• Leave baseclock for what it is right now
• If optional in the BIOS, increase your TDP limits of the processor to 250 Watts (by that you are allowing a higher power draw)
• Leave your base multiplier at default e.g. 34
• Set the per core Turbo multiplier at a maximum of your liking, we applied an MP of 48 on all six cores
• Increase CPU voltage, though setting AUTO might work fine, we applied 1.5V on the processor cores
• Make sure your processor is properly cooled (we used the Corsair H100 LCS cooler at performance settings)
• Save and Exit BIOS / EFI

So these settings allow us to work at a baseline clock of roughly 3400 MHZ that can actually still throttle down to 1200MHz in idle, which helps us in power consumption. However, once the processor gets a kick in the proverbial nuts, it can turbo any or all cores towards that multiplier of 48 times that 100 MHz baseclock frequency, that's a 4800 MHz configuration.

A Prime95 stress test with all four cores active and stressed at ~4800 MHz. You'll need a rather good cooler as temperatures are on the borderline of acceptable.

Mind you that there are many ways to overclock, you could also disable the turbo and just go for the reference frequency. With the help of a new buffer you can also overclock on the bus a little better in 33 MHz increments top, say 133 and 166 MHz. The sky is the limit. Fool around we say... the motherboard is made for this.

The ECS BIOS is hard work though, we had to spend a lot of time to get the platform stable. So if your primary goal is overclocking, we do suggest another motherboard brand.