The Penryn Preview - Part I: Wolfdale Performance

Overclocking

In order to make sure that Intel wasn't having yield issues at 45nm, we wanted to see how far we could push our test chip. With the only multipliers available being 6.0x and 7.0x, we had to rely on FSB overclocking to get us to where we wanted to go. But we made things a little more difficult: we didn't increase CPU core voltage at all.

According to CPU-Z, our Wolfdale sample ran at 1.168V at 2.33GHz. We left the voltage unchanged and went in pursuit of how high of a stable overclock we could get otherwise.

400MHz x 7.0 wasn't a problem at stock voltage:

Neither was 450MHz x 7.0:

The best we could manage without adjusting the core voltage was 460MHz x 7.0, or 3.22GHz:

While this test tells us nothing of overall clock speed headroom of Wolfdale and Penryn in general, it does give us something to hope for.