Page 12 - Overclocking Eight Cores
Overclocking
Now I'm not going to make this a long story out of it, overclocking is easy. With the right processors (and trust me when I say that Intel made very sure to deliver the press some vanilla handpicked sampled QX9775 CPUs) there's nothing more easy than overclocking on a Intel D5400XS. It's definitely not the same feel & flexibility as the nForce 680/780 SLI mainboards have though.
Since we have Extreme edition processors (multiplier unlocked) all we had to do was increase the multiplier step by step. In less than 10 minutes we had our eight cores running at 4.0 GHz per core :) And we didn't even alter voltages, that's right at default voltages we reached 4 GHz per logical core. At 4.4 GHz we had a POST issue. So we settled for the 100% stable 4.0 GHz overclock. I mean honestly .. do you really need more at this time ?
Mind you that this overclock is done based on the Zalman air-cooled copper coolers. En-vision where you can take the platform with some water-cooling or phase change cooling.
Granted even the temps where fantastic thanks to stock voltages; ~ 61 degrees C with all eight cores 100% utilized in a Prime95 test .. overclocking is peanuts on this mainboard. Imaging what you can do with some better cooling. I took some screenshots of this with a Prime Stress test active .. have a look.
look at the screenshot and check temps, overclock and Prime95. We measured and overclocked at a 20 Degrees C ambient room temperature.
We had to jam the applications a little together to get you a full screenshot that actually is not resized (and thus looks better) but you get the idea. Above you can see all eight cores running at 4 GHz per core being stressed with Prime95 and with CoreTemp displaying the temperature delta per logical core.
100% stable .. not bad eh ? Remember the Dhrystone score of 11599 MIPS ? Overclocked we are now at 145289 MIPS. As reference a Q6600 does 44313 MIPS ;) In the next chapter we'll combine our overclocking results and SLI to see what level we can take this PC and what sheer computing power it brings us.
