I7 920 D0 Overclocking
Pushing it to the max with Xigmatek's Thor's Hammer
Page 1 / 6 07/28/09
INTRODUCTION
Intel has released some fabulous chips over the past few years -- Chips that were sold for less but became popular among the enthusiast community for their amazing overclockability. E6600, Q6600, Q9450, are some of the kings of the past in this regard. I have had the pleasure of owning a Q6600, and I can say from first hand experience that it was a gem of a chip. Overclocks surpassing 3.6 GHZ (from a stock 2.66) were achievable on air cooling. With some fine bios tweaking, I had a a Q6600 running at 3.8 GHZ...good times! Fast forward to present day and here I am, with an I7 920. And today we are going to take a brief look at its overclockability on air cooling.
I7 has been around for a while. The CPU series was released in November 2008. As has been the case with Intel's previous processor series, the I7 was tweaked for efficiency. About 4 months after its release, a new I7 stepping dubbed D0 was released. This stepping requires fewer volts than the original C0 stepping and consequently ran cooler, allowing for higher overclocks. Enthusiasts always love this...low volts = low temperature = higher overclocks !
Today we will be looking at the overclocking potential of Core I7 920 D0 on the stock intel heat sink fan, and also on Xigmatek's Thor's Hammer Heat sink.
TEST SYSTEM
The following system was used for this article
EVGA X58 3 X SLI motherboard
I7 920 D0
4 GB Patriot Viper DDR3 1600 MHZ RAM
(3) X EVGA GTX 285 3-SLI (Forceware 186.18)
Gateway 30" XHD
Vista X64 Ultimate
OVERCLOCKING EXPERIENCE
At stock settings, with a 20 X multiplier, and 133 MHZ Base Clock, the I7 920 runs at 2.66 GHZ. Intel has included this neat feature on the lower end I7's called "turbo mode". When enabled, the turbo mode boosts your CPU multiplier by 1. In other words if your multiplier is set to its maximum possible 20 X in the bios, turbo mode will result in an effective 21 X multiplier in Windows. This feature comes in very handy while overclocking. Below is a screenshot with the CPU running at stock settings and with turbo mode enabled resulting in an effective 2.79 GHZ CPU frequency.
Intel recommends a CPU Voltage (Vcore) range of 0.80V to 1.375V. At stock setting our motherboard set the voltage to 1.25V. We thought this was too high for stock and set it to 1.00 V in the bios (without Vdroop)
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