There you have it, the burning question answered 10 minutes after NDA has lifted. Is Clarkbar worth all the hype? Absolutely not in my opinion. Sure, cold bug is finally gone on Intel but cold boot bugs will still creep up. Yes the chip overclocks really well but the downside is that it scales with cold, not voltage. So on a single stage, clocks will be limited by temps, on air, the same thing. Will air/water guys have as much fun overclocking these little dual cores as the C2D or Bloomfield/Lynnfield’s of more recent...it is hard to say. My gut tells me there will be a lot of 'hard walls' hit that Intel clockers aren't use to and will be frustrated by. Of course this is all speculation on my part because this i5 660 hasn't seen two minutes of ambient cooling...unless you consider when I am testing contact with my LN2 pot to be ambient cooling.
The fact of the matter is that the LGA1156 platform isn't the ideal platform for the extreme overclockers at the top of their game. The performance just isn't there. Keep in mind, the comparisons were done on the P55 platform, an already inferior platform to LGA1366. That makes these results even that much more telling. Clarkbar was the little kid on the block that was to bring LGA1156 that world class performance because of the incredible frequencies. It does clock high, no question, but efficiency just isn't there mostly due to memory limitations as I have advised throughout this post. The reason we have only seen 1M and CPU-Z validations thus far is because that is all it is good for. If retail chips help with memory clocks, or somehow blast past 7GHz in benchable clocks, that could change. But as of this moment, the graphic above sums up my feelings on Clarkbar.
Originally Posted by Jor3lBR
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