Ivy Bridge overclocking might royally suck on air, but Chinese overclocker x-powerx800pro is about to show us how boss Ivy Bridge overclocking is with a more… exotic solution.
Taking a look at some of the screenshots posted over at EXP Review, x-powerx800pro was able to take his Intel Core i7 3770K all the way up to 6.616GHz using a 63x multiplier and a base clock of 105.03MHz. What’s super cool though is the fact that the high clock speed was achieved with a core voltage of 1.056v! Oh why thank you 22nm technology! For reference, it typically takes Sandy Bridge (i5 2500K / i7 2600K) processors 1.5v or higher to just to reach 5GHz.
I do also have to mention that I see “ES” here, so the i7 3770K here is an engineering sample; therefore, the chip’s overclocking potential might be very different from retail chips coming in the future. Additionally, I also see “Stepping 9” here as well which is rumored to be the newer E1 chip that’s coming to retail shelves near you.
What else is interesting? How about the fact that CPU-Z is showing a 77W Max TDP. Remember how everyone was going crazy over the 95w TDP box art leaked earlier? Could it be possible that the chip is actually going to be 77W TDP? Maybe.
Okay, so this is cool and all but what does this mean for most of us? Well, nothing actually so don’t get your hopes up too much. Unless you’ve got a LN2 cooling solution readily available, it’s more a proof of concept that Ivy Bridge is still a fine overclocker given that proper cooling exists.
Source / Image Source: EXP Review
Update: According to the EXP Review forums, 1.056v is the VTT voltage. The CPU voltage is actually 1.85v. This is apparently a bug with the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
dosent the i7-3770k have 8 threads???
Yup. 4 cores, 8 threads. I’m thinking the overclocker had HT turned off which is why it’s reporting 4 threads instead.
Sam, you might want to look into the actual vcore used. That’s just a read bug with that particular version of CPUz, that’s VTT voltage you are seeing. CPU Vcore is much higher than that!
Yes, that’s already been covered in the “update” that was posted at the bottom of the article. Real vcore is 1.85v.
I think that CPU-Z also reports the Sandy Bridge VTT as the Core voltage – it certainly does with my i7-2600k and Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3