Overclocking Results

We’ve had great success overclocking our Intel i7-860 processor with almost every LGA 1156 motherboard we’ve tag-teamed it with so our expectations for the P55M-UD4 were extremely high. Not only did we want to break the 4GHz barrier, but we also wanted to push it a bit further to see how many extra megahertz we could pull out of this CPU on air cooling alone. As with all of my overclocking efforts, I like to go into the BIOS and make a few initial configurations that will help us get the best overclock we can. Here are a few of the major settings we configured during our overclocking session with the P55M-UD4:

– Set CPU ratio to 20x
– Set DRAM Frequency to Auto
– Set Load-Line Calibration to Auto (improves VDroop)
– Disable Intel EIST (SpeedStep)
– Disable C1E Support (power-saving feature)

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 215MHz before stability started to break down during testing. We backed it down to 209MHz and re-ran Cinebench several times to ensure the cores could run at 100 percent without any stability problems before we considered our overclock a success.

At the conclusion of our testing, we were able to increase the base clock to 209MHz and the DRAM frequencies to 1672MHz, which helped us get to a stable 4.18GHz on our i7-860 processor. This equated to a 68 percent increase in performance over this CPU’s stock settings. See below for more details on how we overclocked the i7-860 using the P55M-UD4 motherboard:

 

Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4 LGA 1156 Micro ATX Motherboard Review - Motherboards 65
This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 4.18GHz overclock on the Gigabyte P55M-UD4


CPU Speed BCLK CPU Multiplier DMI DRAM Frequency DRAM Timings CPU Voltage Temp (Idle) Temp (Load)
4.18GHz 209MHz


20x

3343MHz 1672 MHz 10-11-11-31 1T 1.36v 37c, 37, 39c, 39c
74c, 77c, 73c, 79c 

Overclocking Results

 

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