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Intel Core i7 930 CPU review - busting through 4GHz

by Tarinder Sandhu on 1 March 2010, 08:16 4.0

Tags: Core i7 930 OC (25/02/10), SCAN, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qawc6

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Overclocking

Overclocking

But you didn't really read this review to see the new chip add five per cent extra performance to the existing model, did you?

We overclocked the processor whilst using the Intel-supplied cooler. Turbo Boost and EIST were both disabled. CPU voltage was raised from 1.25V to 1.3V and various chipset voltages were raised by five per cent.

Cranking up the BCLK to 200MHz resulted in a failed POST. A 195MHz BCLK (4,095MHz) would occasionally fail in a multi-core benchmark, but a 191MHz clocking passed a 30-minute Prime95 test.




The stock cooler kept the CPU below 85°C at all times. We're adamant that a better cooling solution - Corsair's H50 or Thermalright's Ultra Extreme - would facilitate a better result. Our aim was to see what we could achieve with a five-minute overclock and the packaged heatsink/fan.



Keeping things simple, the 'uncore' frequency - controlling the L3 cache frequency, amongst other things - was kept at a modest 2.86GHz and DDR3 at 1,145MHz.

Head on over to the next page to see what kind of numbers the 4GHz chip spits out.

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