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

[Scaniris]

Well I hope this helps, I'm not really an extreme OCer, and I'm mainly looking for balanced configurations. Some articles @ Tom's hardare and PC World are really interesting about OCing the P55 compatible cpus, but they mainly talk about I5 750. The architecture is the same finally and some good indications are given in their reviews, good starting point to try different ways for having a balanced system, corresponding to our personal use.

In my opinion, the OC is also very helpful for cutomizing the system for our own use. Some people see in OC only a competition tool. I think OC is a value added tool for daily use. And if we want to take all the benefit of this new architecture, coming from the Nehalem revolution, we should also consider to use C State, Turbo mode, advanced speed step... the Dynamic Datacenter benefit is huge in enterprise architecture, and we, hobby and private user, are able to access this kind of technology, do you imagine the chance we have? I think it's great to use these new features. We have more performance, yes. Every week I'm so happy to make some Poc with customers demonstrating how Nehalem EP (and coming soon Nehalem EX) CPU beats some Sparc based systems, and some old multi cpu monolitic architectures for less money, less energy consumption, with same (Nehalem EX) reliability and HA features (EX is definitely positionned by Intel in front of the Itanium... in the past it wasn't same story with Dunnington...^^ something is changing isn't it?). We have a dynamic and virtualized architecture, in our home pc. Fantastic isn't it?

I don't think it's a responsible attitude to run 24x7 an OCed CPU. Not because of the CPU lifetime. I don't care. But because of the power consumption. We can play with OC, it's a funny part of this hobby, but we don't need it for daily use. Each watt we are using to increase the clock speed need another watt for cooling... Running a 24x7 OCed system with big graphic cards and be pride of it? Be pride of the power invoice that we receive at the end of the month? Well... I don't share this pride with others running 100GHz and more @ home, behind a ''good'' reason like folding@ home and stuffs like this. I don't agree with that, I mean participate to such programm is very good, but should be done with a responsible system, not with a power eater! Because density in datacenters is more efficient than splitted OCed computers.... I have another PC, Energy star 5.0 certified and partcipate to folding@home and change sometimes to others. I'll never use my gaming system on a 24x7 basis for that ^^

Why do I use benchmark tools? Very easy: for fun, and to check if the performance increase provided by some OC upgrade is really useful or not. This is a decision assistant, to confirm or not a setup. If I have to increase the power consumption to get only 2 or 3 more percent... I'll not validate the setting.

So... sorry for this off topic summary of my overclocking approach. Just want to give another point of view about how to use OC embedded features