Overclocking
Manual Overclocking
The BIOS has a very nice auto overclocking feature for the processor. Of course real tweakers and overclockers spit on automated overclocking, and with a little time and trial you can certainly achieve very hefty overclocks. For this test run we overclocked a Core i7 870. The overclock you'll see are 100% stable, from our test sessions we'll show you the overclocked results in all of our benchmarks.
So with the Front Side Bus officially annihilated, things tend to change a little while overclocking a Nehalem based processor. Only a little though. It's a little weird but the concept remains the same. In the BIOS you'll find a 133 MHz register, that is the BASE CPU clock... look at that as your 'FSB' to play around with. Of course, with an Extreme Edition processor, things would be much easier, unfortunately this is not the case with today's launched processors.
All three processors released today are multiplier locked, meaning your starting point is to select the highest possible multiplier in the BIOS and then increase that base clock
Don't be afraid to play around with CPU voltages as even on the stock air cooler you can achieve some pretty snazzy results.
Core i7 870 overclocking
First up for this processor, check what your current maximum multiplier values are. We fire of a higher base clock to that multiplier of 22, 183 MHz. As such we where able to overclock the Core i7 870 processor to 4.0 GHz.
BIOS settings:
- c1e disabled
- cstate disabled
- turbo/speedstep off
- cpu host frequency = 183 -> that will give you 22x183 - 4023 MHz
- CPU VCore at 1.35v
- VTT at 1.35v
- dram 1.65v
- dram ratio = 2:12 (we are using some very spiffy memory today)
- CL settings according to your rams.
At 4023 MHz on the mainstream LCS cooler we easily booted into windows. When we stress the CPU cores with prime 95, temperatures now rise to 72 Degrees C (161F) which really is close to the maximum limit you want to go to.
We ended at 4023 MHz on the four active processors cores with our DDR3 memory locked in at 2200 MHz CAS 7, which is very sexy.
Overclocking itself, it is not as easy as many other motherboards to achieve with this processor. Mind you that overclocking will draw a lot of power from your system. But after a little tweaking and patience, you'll get there.
