Back in January 2009 I built me a new desktop to upgrade from my seriously aged 2.8Ghz P4 system. After much deliberation I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and go with the latest and greatest that Intel had to offer....the brand new Core i7. The CPUs brought a premium price for sure, but with 4 cores and hyper-threading, I figured I'd be safe for a few years.
Fast forward 2 years and I decided it was time to see about upgrading my socket 1366 chip. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the 1366 did not have a desktop upgrade path. What? It wasn't THAT old?!? Was it? Intel only released one generation of processors for it, switching to the LGA1255 socket shortly thereafter. That SUCKS!
So since I have the low-end 920, it has plenty of head room, right? I read everywhere about OC'ers hitting 4Ghz on this chip...well, the d0 stepping anyway....and of course, because I was a very early adopter, I have the c0 version. More SUCKAGE!
I have the "more than adequate" Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R (rev 1.0) board, so I figured I'd hit a pretty good number, right? I researched several sites that outlined how to overclock that chip on that board, and I made all the recommended adjustments. I even upgraded the fan on my CoolerMaster Gemini II cooler to a 2600 RPM model.
I'd been monitoring the thermals on the system prior to any changes, and the core temp at "rest" was around 32 degrees C. Pretty good, so I figured I had plenty of room. However, following all the steps in the tutorials, I was only able to get a stable system at 21X multiplier and Bclk 160 @ 1.375 V, which comes out at 3.3Ghz. Any higher and it would eventually BSOD with a hal.dll error. Oh well, some is better than none, I guess. Running 8 cores full blast, the core temps top out at around 70 degrees C, which is still well below TJMax. I can live with that. I reenabled all of the "peformance" and "energy saving" settings in the BIOS that you disable to find a stable OC, so most of the time, the multiplier drops down to around 12X anyway.
Maybe this will hold me over for another couple of years.
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