The State of Overclocking on Intel Motherboards

[Rob Williams]

I'd like to think that I'm the kind of person who doesn't hold a grudge, but after bouts of unsuccessful overclocking runs with Intel motherboards in the past, I just about gave up. Until I decided to investigate further to see where things stood today. Have my opinions changed after overclocking with Intel's DP67BG this past weekend?

Read through my personal look at overclocking with an Intel motherboard this past weekend, and then discuss it or flame here!

[looisboo]

Nice and interesting article rob and that black bios theme was cool

[Rob Williams]

Glad you liked it!

And I agree on the black BIOS. I noticed that the new Rampage III Black Edition from ASUS also has one. Much cooler to look at hours on end when tweaking ;-)

[Kayden]

I did as well like the Black bios and I liked the review as well. I just switched to Intel after being an AMD guy for many years and found the overclocking for it to be complicated at first glance but after tinkering and experimenting a little, I somehow got use to it very quickly. I managed to get to 4ghz with 1.425 core volt and it's stable as a rock with only a 5c increase in idle temp with my i7 950. I just wish I could have read this 3 months ago when I made my switch. (c;

[eunoia]

Originally Posted by Kayden

I managed to get to 4ghz with 1.425 core volt ... with my i7 950.

This vcore seems dangerously high. What is the default vcore without overclocking?

For comparison, I can run an i7 930 at 4.011GHz rock stable with 1.26250v using a Gigabyte X58A-UD5. I believe Intel was making overclocking on their boards purposely onerous before to protect their prices for higher series (essentially speed binned) chips. Maybe now the strategy is to burn the chips out.

[Kayden]

Originally Posted by eunoia

This vcore seems dangerously high. What is the default vcore without overclocking?

For comparison, I can run an i7 930 at 4.011GHz rock stable with 1.26250v using a Gigabyte X58A-UD5. I believe Intel was making overclocking on their boards purposely onerous before to protect their prices for higher series (essentially speed binned) chips. Maybe now the strategy is to burn the chips out.

It wasn't really dangerous because I have seen them go up to 1.55 stable for OC on other cpus. However I did figure that vcore setting for the 24x multiplier and I had just gone down to the 23x because for some reason cpuz would show 4ghz but other progs would only show 3.8ghz. I did not think to change the vcore when I went to the 23x because I got complacent or lazy one of the two, so none the less I dropped it down to 1.30v and its working pretty darn stable there. Thanks for getting me to think about it, the default is 1.25v btw. I did not see much of a change in temp at idle but load it is better by 6c. Thanks again for making me think.

[Kougar]

Just because people run them at 1.55v stable doesn't mean that it is not dangerous! That's about the threshold where core degradation will set in, especially when combined with high core temperatures. With those secific chips I personally wouldn't recommend anything above 1.45v for 24/7 loads.