Overclocking results
For those who have been living under a rock since the i7 platform was unveiled last year, all three i7 processors are considered absolute beasts in the overclocking department. Many consumers and hardware enthusiasts alike have reported pushing these CPUs well past 4GHz on air cooling alone. So, for our analysis, our goal was to see if we could reach a stable 4GHz.
For those who don’t understand some of the intricacies surrounding overclocking an i7, I recommend a previous article Ryan wrote on how to overclock i7s. For those of you who already browsed that write-up, please read on.
Unfortunately, my overclocking experience began with a dark cloud over it as my MSI Eclipse broke down during the initial portions of overclocking. After pushing the CPU base clock to 160MHz, we experienced multiple reboots and then the board would not power on at all. After contacting MSI about our issue, they shipped me a new board. So, the rest of the overclocking was done on this new board.
After receiving the new board, my luck automatically changed. I was able to bump the base clock to 180MHz before having to increase the CPU, IOH, and QPI voltage. After upping the voltage, I was able to increase the base clock all the way to 193MHz before I noticed stability issues. So, I backed it down to 190MHz and that seemed to work great.
After all was said and done, I had the core running at a solid 4GHz using the following settings below:
| CPU Speed | BCLK | CPU Multiplier | QPI | DRAM Frequency | DRAM Timings | CPU Voltage | QPI Voltage | Temp (Idle) | Temp (Load) |
| 4.001GHz | 190 MHz | 21x with Intel Turbo Boost | 3433 MHz | 1144 MHz | 7-7-7-19 1T | 1.472v | 1.22v | 40c, 39c, 41c, 37c | 80c, 79c, 77c, 74c |
