overclocking on air...

[eccerr0r]

I was wondering about peoples success on overclocking their 4-core i5/i7 CPUs past well past 4GHz on air cooling. I'm running my i7-2700K at 4.1GHz because the motherboard starts beeping overheating alerts when I run at 4.2GHz (with all four cores at 100% utilization) - but doesn't crash. This is with the stock cooler.

The machine is already faster than I could ever imagine (for now ) but wonder how much further I could go... and maybe more if the cost is low...

[Mad_Professor]

Re: overclocking on air...

I took my i5 2500k to 5.2ghz at 1.4v on air using the coolermaster hyper-212 plus, but couldn't get it to run stable and I was hitting 70 Celsius. Once you go past 4.7ghz you don't really see difference in speed or responsiveness, might crunch numbers faster but that's about it.

[mariushm]

Re: overclocking on air...

The FX-8320 i bought a couple of weeks ago is stock 3.5 ghz if I remember correctly and goes turbo to 3.7 or 3.9 ghz.
I don't know off the top of my head and I'm visiting my parents now and they have a crappy duron with 1gb of ram and searching for accurate info is NOT fun.

I installed a Zerotherm FZ120 on it :

http://www.frostytech.com/articlevie...articleID=2281
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article849-page1.html

but i changed the fan on this one with a fluid dynamic bearing , Nexus Real Silent..

Anyway, with cool and quiet enabled the system is running at 900 mhz - 1.4 ghz when idle, in desktop, watching movies etc and temperature goes down to about 16-18c
When doing h264 encoding stressing all cores, temp goes up to 26c

so you can imagine there's plenty of room to overclock when i'll be in the mood.

[eccerr0r]

Re: overclocking on air...

Yeah I was a bit disappointed, the 2700K was base 3.5GHz and 3.9GHz turboboost, and all I could get was running 4.1GHz all the time on all four cores before hitting the temperature limit (which I'm not sure what it is)... I didn't muck with voltage because it has a stronger influence on temperature than frequency...

[TELVM]

Re: overclocking on air...

Yeah I was a bit disappointed, the 2700K was base 3.5GHz and 3.9GHz turboboost, and all I could get was running 4.1GHz all the time on all four cores before hitting the temperature limit ...

For crazy OC with air as medium of heat exchange, you really need some serious heatsink and fans. To reach stable 4.1GHz on six cores @ 1.53V from a base 3.0GHz 4-core Phenom II 960T I use this mthrfckr ...


... and a grand total of nine fans inside the case, all included.

This oven of a CPU draws 320W from the wall just by itself while grinding Prime95 blend/large FFTs, but the NH-D14 and the troop of fans manage to keep heat at bay.

=> LARGE