Overclocking a Core i7 980X on the RE3

Overclocking a Core i7 980X on the RE3

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 ASUS Rampage III 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.

In the default configuration however, 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 level up function. With the 980X Gulftown you can select 4.0 and 4.2 GHz, enable, save and reboot. and bam .. you OC is steady and running completely automatic.

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 voltages 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.

Temperatures now start to increase fast but regardless of that, we ended at a 100% stable 4.5 GHz. That is a baseclock of 151 MHz with a 30 MP. Overclocking itself is a pretty easy thing to achieve with this processor and motherboard. 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.

To make things 100% stable at 4.5 GHz we had to apply a little bit more voltage and ended at 1.425 volts on the processor as 1.4v would crash after a couple of minutes heavy stressing the 6 processor cores.

At 4.5 GHz with all six cores on the CPU stressed (not GPU) we utilize roughly 370 Watts (6 cores + 6 HT stressed 100%). Check out the stress test below.

So here you can see the processor clocked at 4500 MHz. We applied a 1.425 Voltage in order to maintain stability with extreme CPU stress. On this setup temps peaked to a way too high 92 degrees C / 197F and that's really over the maximum you want to go. But sure, we just squeezed nearly 1200 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.