**Official** Core i7 860/870 overclocking thread

[unclewebb]

Snowman89: You sound like a good candidate for RealTemp and i7 Turbo. Time for you to see what your multi is really up to.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/...alTempBeta.zip

On these new CPUs if you have C3/C6 enabled, your multiplier can be very dynamic based on load and can change hundreds of times a second. Old school software that samples your multiplier once per second is usually going to be wrong or I guess right for that one particular instance in time but doesn't do a good job of telling you what's really going on inside your CPU.

Run a single Super PI bench and take a screen shot about half way through it and I'll tell you what your multi is really up to and what these new tools are telling you.

An i7-870 has a default multiplier of 22. 3DMark06 came out long before these new CPUs so it doesn't report the turbo boost that is available.

With 3 or 4 cores active, an i7-870 can use a +2 turbo boost. Most CPUs only get a +1 turbo boost when all 4 cores are active so that's probably why Core Temp is assuming that you are only running at 23X.

If you enable C3/C6 then this CPU can also use a 27X multiplier when only a single core is in the active state and the other 3 are inactive in the C3/C6 state. When a second core becomes active, this will drop down to a maximum of 26 and when 3 or 4 cores are active, you'll be back at a maximum of 24X.

With C3/C6 enabled, this transitioning to and from different multipliers is happening internally hundreds of times a second. You need some modern software that decided to follow Intel's Turbo White Paper released in November 2008 to accurately determine the correct multiplier. The method is kind of complex so most software doesn't bother doing this correctly.