Overclocking a Core i7 980X on the ASRock X58 Exreme3
Overclocking a Core i7 980X on the ASRock X58 Exreme3
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 X58 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.
ASRock however sneaks in a slightly higher baseclock of 140 MHz
In the default configuration 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 increase function. With the 980X Gulftown you can select 3.6, 3.8, 4.0 and 4.2 GHz, enable, save and reboot. And bam... your OC should be steady and running completely automatically. Unfortunately it didn't... the system would not post anymore after 4000 MHz. A little weird but we noticed that this function will fire off really high BCLK frequency. Best is to overclock manually.
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 the voltage towards 1.4V on the processor and use a Noctua heatpipe cooler. We easily booted into Windows at ~4.2 GHz with the Core i7 980X processor.
We could not get higher as temperatures started to get out of control and the system would shutdown under stress. Bear in mind that overclocking draws much more power from your system and also take into consideration that your cooling solution needs to be proper as going from four to six cores should produce more heat.
So here you can see the processor clocked at 4160 MHz. We applied a 1.40v Voltage in order to maintain stability with extreme CPU stress. On this setup cpu core temps peaked to a way too high 80 degrees C / 176F and that's really the maximum you want to go. But sure, we just squeezed nearly 900 MHz extra out of each of the six cores for free man.
This overclock we could only recommend if you are using liquid cooling, bringing the temps down below 70 degrees C more easily.
