Overclocking

When I put together my system, I picked the i7-930 because Microcenter offered it for less than the i7-920. Both are practically the same processor; the i7-920 is 2.66 GHz and mine is 2.8 GHz. Both are legendary for their ability to be overclocked. I didn’t necessarily run with the overclocking crowd, but I’ve always had in the back of my mind that it could be done. Last night I ran into some forum posts with people complaining that they “only” got to 4.1 GHz with my processor/cooler combination before they started hitting stability issues.

I don’t want to push things that hard, especially when I’m concerned about whether my CPU cooler is working at full efficiency. (I want to pick up some thermal grease and remount it.) But I was bit by the bug.

I can’t actually change the multiplier of my processor — it’s fixed at 21x the base clock frequency. But the base clock is trivial to change. I made sure all the thermal monitoring and auto-shutoffs were enabled and bumped it up from 133 MHz to 150MHz. And presto! I’m running a bit hot now, but one simple change and:

I’m not certain why it’s reported as a Xeon; it’s not. But the clock speed is accurate. When I get around to trying to remount the cooler, I think I’m going to have a go at the 4 GHz barrier, though I don’t want to run too far out of spec.

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