EVGA P55 FTW LGA 1156 ATX Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

Overclocking the new LGA 1156 socket has some new wrinkles that Ryan explains in in three separate articles on the i7-870, i5-750, and  i7-860 so I won’t go into too much depth into those differences. Suffice to say, the LGA 1156 processors have been exceptional for overclocking, and the price point of these CPUs are really drawing lots of consumers toward this new socket type.

When I started overclocking our i7-860 LGA 1156 processor manually, I went through a few basic steps for setting up my test system’s BIOS settings. Here’s a quick run-down of a few settings I altered before I started to overclock the EVGA P55 FTW:

– Disable Intel EIST (SpeedStep)
– Disable C1E Support (power-saving feature)
– Adjust memory multiplier to 1600MHz, but leave DRAM Timing Mode at Auto

After those initial steps were completed, I dropped the CPU multiplier to 20x and starting increasing the base clock until I noticed stability issues. We ramped up the FSB all the way to 210MHz before stability started to break down during testing. We backed it down to 206MHz and re-ran Cinebench to ensure the cores could run at 100 percent before we considered our overclock “rock solid”.

In the end, we were able to bump the base clock to 206MHz and the DRAM frequencies to 1648MHz, which helped us get to a stable 4.12GHz on our i7-860 processor. This equated to a 67.96 percent increase in performance over this CPU’s stock settings. See below for more details on how we overclocked the i7-860 using the P55 FTW motherboard:

 

This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 4.12GHz overclock on the EVGA P55 FTW.