eVGA x58 SLI Classified review - Overclocking with the eVGA X58 SLI x3 Classified

Overclocking with the eVGA X58 SLI x3 Classified

I've already mentioned a couple of times that this board was designed with pure overclocking bliss in mind. So let's do that, and I want to show you exactly what I did here, so here's where we go a little more in-depth in overclocking.

First off some ground rules. To successfully overclock, you need proper products, creating the right infrastructure and platform. Your infrastructure must be right from A to Z. You can drop a grand into your system, yet if you have a crappy power supply, it can ruin everything. Make sure you have quality components. We made sure of this ourselves. Our overclock is done with a Core i7 965 processor and 2000 MHz OCZ DDR3 (Triple channel) memory on a BFG EX 1200 Watt power supply.

We'll apply a two step overclock, first in the BIOS and then take it higher in Windows.

1. First things first - make sure you installed the latest bios.
2. We simply figure to handle our overclock this way. In the BIOS we select dummy overclocking. Instantly boosting the processor towards 3600 MHz + Turbo = 3740 MHz (150 MHz QPI). That is a very nice overclock already with really good timings, voltages and settings (we have power saving features disabled, processor does not clock down when idle).

This will be your first stage overclock. The second one will be software based from within windows with their proprietary software called "eLeet overclocking tool", which you are already looking at it in the screenshots. The software allows you to overclock from within Windows on the fly, and quite frankly is one of the best tools I've dealt with in a while.

For anything higher than 3600 MHz (3750 with turbo mode) we simply use E-Leet, eVGA's overclocking tool. Right now we increase CPU voltage towards 1.4 V on the VCORE, and actually left the rest alone for now.

Now we push the multiplier towards 27 on all four processor cores, 27x150=4050.

Success .. we actually have the processor running at 4 GHz already. Mind you that we achieved this in what ... from BIOS to system overclock in 90 seconds?