Overclocking Results
Many hardware enthusiasts have reported pushing these their i7s 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 how to overclock 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.
During initial overclocking, 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 keep it stable. One item to note is that Intel Turbo Boost was enabled which gave me an extra clock cycle to work with during overclocking. We enabled and disabled it, but found out that having it enabled allowed us to reach our highest stable benchmark.
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 |
