With the hardware side of my build nearing the end, I’ve been working on system tweaking and overclocking. The new I7 platform has a lot of new overclocking facets to it over the AMD architecture that I was used to. I7 overclocking revolves around the base clock frequency (Bclock) a pretty close analog to the Front-Side Bus speed of the old days. Changing the Bclock affects the speed of the CPU, the L3 cache, the on-chip memory controller, and the RAM and each one of those is further tailored by a multiplier. Another new player is the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) which is like the HyperTransport that AMD has had for years – in lieu of a Front-Side Bus, the QPI connects the CPU to the motherboard chipset. Generally the QPI has plenty of bandwidth so you can keep it scaled back a bit as you crank up the CPU and memory. And of course with overclocking comes voltage tweaks to feed the power that’s necessary.
The bios on my new machine gives access to tweak all these thing and is laid out very well. It also supports storing overclock settings to different profiles to make it easy to switch around and compare. Here’s the screen that deals will the clocks and multipliers (with the default settings). Besides this there is another screen for changing voltages and another for RAM timings.
In my first tweak session, I initially pushed things too fast without the necessary bump in voltage and it wouldn’t post. After edging some voltages up (Vcore and VTT) and the speed (Bclock) back down I starting having more success. After several more trials over a couple weeks I got things dialed in pretty well, while not raising the voltages (and the temps) too far. Currently I’ve raised the CPU up around 43% to 3.8GHz. That’s over a full gHz over the stock speed (for free!) so I’m pretty pleased. I have speed stepping still on so it doesn’t run at that speed full-time, though. I also have Intel’s Turbo feature enabled which means at times one core may jump up to about 4Ghz!
| Param | Default | OC | increase |
| CPU (GHz) | 2.66 | 3.8 | 43% |
| Bclock (Mhz) | 133 | 190 | 43% |
| Vcore | 1.17 | 1.31 | +140mV |
| VTT | 1.15 | 1.29 | +140mV |
| VIOH | 1.10 | 1.22 | +120mV |
| QPI (MHz) | 2400 | 3425 | 43% |
| DDR3 | 1066 | 1524 (7 7 7 16 1T) | 43% |
| CPU Temp (typ C) | 32 | 44 | +12 |
| Mobo NB (IOH) Temp (typ C) | 39 | 42 | +3 |
| Mobo SB (ICH) Temp (typ C) | 28 | 30 | +2 |
I also cranked the graphics card up just a bit. My GTX260 is already EVGA’s factory overclocked model, so I didn’t want to push it too much further, but with decent cooling in my case I knew I could get by with a little.
| Param | Default | OC | increase |
| Core | 626 | 675 | 8% (17% over standard gtx260) |
| Shader | 1349 | 1455 | 8% |
| Memory | 2106 | 2400 | 14% |
| GPU Temp (idle/max C) | 37/65 | 40/70 | +3/+5 |
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
