Intel Core i7 980X Overclocking Update: Breaking 4GHz With 6 Cores
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2010 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
So how does it feel to have the worst Core i7 980X overclocking scores online?I can't say that it's what I'm most proud of. That award would have to go to the time I wrote a review and left out the 'l' in overclocking. Needless to say after everyone pointed out how abysmal our overclocks were and after even Intel called to let us know that we should be seeing better, we gave it another shot.
Intel's DX58SO Motherboard
A motherboard swap, a little more voltage and backing off the un-core clock a bit yielded something a bit more respectable out of our Core i7 980X sample:
Keep an eye on what we're talking about here. Six cores, 12MB of L3 cache, all running at 4.13GHz with Intel's stock heatsink. With more voltage, even higher frequencies should be possible - but at the expense of increased power consumption.
The performance at 4.13GHz is even more ridiculous than the stock Core i7 980X:
Another ~17% improvement over the already bonkers 980X is just crazy. At 53.7 fps in the second pass of our encoding test we're more than twice as fast as a Core i7 920. As much as we hate that Intel is maintaining two different sockets for its desktop CPUs, the Core i7 980X makes LGA-1366 worth it. Now if Intel could only get that price down.
The performance doesn't come for free though. At 1.359V the 980X draws quite a bit more power:
The 17% performance improvement comes at the expense of a 20% increase in total system power. It's not the most efficient way to get more speed, but if for some reason you're not happy with your 980X's default performance this is the sacrifice you'll have to make.
Thanks for bearing with us as we tried to push our chip further and got some more respectable results :)
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Visual - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Basic computer literacy advice - when typing text in a text area, do not insert line-breaks (means, do not press Enter) just because you think there is no more space left on the current line. Computers are not type-writers, they can wrap text to new lines automatically according to the available space, which will often be different for the different places that the text might be presented on, as well as for the different users with different user agents each with potentially different font settings...Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Actually his post was easier to read than yours. lolformulav8 - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
I definitely agree! :)Barneyk - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Yeah, I was a bit surprised when I saw the Swedish hardware site Nordichardware get it up to 4.4GHz without much difficulty as soon as I had finished reading Anandtechs review. :)But dont despair Anand, you guys are fantastic at other things. :)
aigomorla - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
if you would take a few moments to browse our forums,You'll see i did it 3 months ago.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=20450...">http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=20450...
stw500 - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Why do you compare a high overclocked brand new cpu only with non overclocked cpus...that makes only little sens...Much more interesting is a comparing of for example a C2D @ 4 Ghz versus i7 980 @ 4 Ghz... how much faster are these cpus eye to eye...
sbrown23 - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
So if you wanted an apples to apples comparison, the data is there for a stock i7 975 vs stock i7 980X. That's your comparison of like for like and gives you an idea how much faster the 980X is. You can always extrapolate the i7 975 to get a representation of it's performance overclocked against the 980X overclocked. I don't see why the authors would want to re-run all those tests on a 975 to cover that scenario.stw500 - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
i meant which of these cpus and how much is faster... ;)glockjs - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
just stable enough to run the benchmarks? or total system stability? always wondered about numbers sites show with oc's...theres a huge dif between being able to boot and show a screen and a system thats considered oc stable. with the numbers being thrown out can you run prime small fft stable for at least 3 hours? just curious :/killerclick - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Yeah, given that this processor will in most cases be used for more serious stuff than gaming, I'd like to know how many hours of stress testing can it take before producing an error.