Core i7/X58 Overclocking Thread

[dejanh]

dejanh..yes you are right..therefore i want the people see what real performance they get for the money with my chess test!
If you look to my list then you see clearly how good the core i7 920 is compared with the 940 & 965.

JP.

Hey there!

Well, strange things happen every day and today was one...

First things first, I love this chess simulation. It really loads the cores 100% (reported usage never fell below 99.2% on any of the threads, averaged around 99.8%), it is more representative of real life than Prime or any of those other things, and it really generates maximum heat on all cores. So, now that I am done praising you on to my testing...

I decided to give your program a whirl to see what kind of results I can get. Naturally, anything with 20x multiplier was a no go so I tested with 200x19, 212x19, 216x19, and then finally tried to do 220x19. Well, all went very good until I got to the last test. I upped the volts in BIOS to 1.5V vcore, 1.475V-ish QPI/DRAM. I booted, ran for a couple of seconds, then my computer just shut down and I could not reload into Vista. I ended up having to pull the battery on my R2E and manually restore BIOS2 to BIOS1. After doing that, I reinstalled BIOS 0804 to BIOS1 and for the first time since I bought this board after updating the BIOS the board actually rebooted itself successfully and prompted me to set the new BIOS settings! Whoa!

It gets better. So I decide, what the heck, I do not have any of my profiles any more, how about I just set X.M.P for memory (sets DRAM voltage to 1.65V and QPI/DRAM to 1.35V), leave all timings as is, all other voltages to Auto and set the BCLK to 200 and multiplier to 20x. I booted, started your app, ran it, and crashed about 4 minutes in. I was like "crap, here we go again with the 20x multiplier" but then I remembered reading somewhere that somebody said QPI/DRAM voltage should be always no less than 0.01V and no more than 0.03V away from vcore. So I grabbed my MM, measured the vcore voltage, then set the QPI/DRAM volts to be exactly 0.025V apart. Booted back into Vista 64 with the new settings, ran your app, and no crash! None, nada, it keeps going strong! I stopped it about 15 minutes in just because it had already stabilized on load and temps 5 minutes prior to that. Impressive! It looks like I at least managed to find something that makes 20x multiplier work.

Anyway, here is the screen (I forgot to save results)...yes, I am sure the volts can be lowered, but quite frankly I do not care at all. I am using all auto except X.M.P profile and I have manually upped the QPI/DRAM from 1.35V to 1.40V. Cooled with a CoolerMaster V8 using AS5, in a toasty 23C room with the computer stuck in a corner where there is barely any airflow :p

200x20 baby