Intel’s Core i7-975 & 950: Preparing for Lynnfield
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Overclocking
Without increasing the core voltage on the 975, and using the retail cooler the highest stable overclock I was able to achieve was 3.73GHz:
Boosting core voltage by 16% I was able to hit 4.13GHz with the retail air cooler, but I could not get the system fully stable at any higher frequencies:
Gary was able to squeeze a 24/7 stable 4.4GHz out of his 975 on aftermarket air cooling with the EVGA X58 Classified and Gigabyte EX58-Extreme motherboards at 1.4V Core Vid, 1.375V VTT, 1.62V VDimm, and memory set to 7-8-7-20 at DDR3-1704 (new OCZ Blade PC17000). However, he admitted that if the retail Core i7-975 chips clock anything like the ES samples we were provided with that buying one would be a huge waste of money (actually his exact words were quite explicit but not printable). All of his retail D0 stepping Core i7-920 processors are easily hitting 4.4GHz~4.6GHz on high-end air coolers when installed in a variety of X58 motherboards. We have a retail Core i7-975 arriving later this week and will provide an update in the near future. As is always the case with overclocking: your mileage may vary.
| Processor | Highest Overclock (Stock Voltage) | Highest Overclock (Overvolted) | % Increase over stock |
| AMD Phenom II X4 955 | 3.8GHz | 3.9GHz | 22% |
| Intel Core i7 975 | 3.73GHz | 4.13GHz | 24% |
With relatively similar transistor counts, similar starting clock speeds, it's wonderful to see that AMD is able to offer virtually identical overclocking headroom to Intel's flagship Core i7 in a 64-bit operating system.
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BSMonitor - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Are you on crack? Lynnfield is a Nehalem without the tri-channel memory controller... Lynnfield is cheaper by $100 at the same speed bin and runs cooler. Some benchmarks on ES put the Lynnfield faster than Nehalem counterparts where the single/dual threaded apps make use of the more generous turbo mode...Put the reefer down and actually read the article. Lynnfield is 2 months away and already crushing any Phenom II or Penryn and as fast as its Nehalem counterparts at $100 cheaper.
iamezza - Friday, June 5, 2009 - link
As weird as it seems TA152H is actually an i7 platform Fanboy!philosofool - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - link
Yeah: he's on crack.nitromullet - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - link
I was asking because I want the flexibility of Crossfire and SLI on the same motherboard, which is something the Lynnfield/P55 platform will not provide. I'm worried that Intel will phase out the 920's, and I'll be left having to a $600ish cpu to get into the X58 platform.