Core i7 3960X overclocking
The Sandy Bridge-E platforms overclocking incorporates many of the factors already introduced by the LGA 1155 platform, but it introduces new variables into play. The easiest way to overclock is via the Turbo multipliers. Thereby let's increase the current limit of the Turbo Boost technology to overcome the TDP of 130W and avoid dips in frequency at full load, and set the turbo multiplier at the desired frequency divided by 100, which is still the basic clock pulse. In previous generations many "old school" users have complained of the impossibility to increase the base clock (corresponding to the former FSB). The main reason was attributed to the external clock generator adopted by the LGA 1155 platforms. Although in the LGA 2011 clock generator has been integrated into the x79 chipset, possible changes of the base clock without running into instability directly remain in a maximum range of +/-10 MHz. Nevertheless, Intel has introduced a new degree of freedom that consists of a multiplier of the FSB, settable to the values of 1.25x and 1.66x The effect is to actually change the base clock bringing to 125 MHz and 166 MHz, respectively, which can be further modified with baseclock adjustments through the generator. Recall that the increase in baseclock also involves the inevitable increase in the frequency of RAM, this usually leads to an increase in overall system performance, but also to an instability of the system components associated with the base clock. To avoid this, there have been some fixes both for the PCI Express (PEG Link), both for the communication bus to the chipset (DMI link). Through these fixes you can stabilize the operating frequency to the one defined by the standard to avoid possible malfunctions and damage, especially if overclocking the base clock. We had no way of testing the 3830K CPU, but considering the classification as a partially unlocked, we can expect the lack of the basic clock multipliers and their fixes. In the coming days we will perform thorough testing to understand the impact of the increase in base clock on performance, with the same frequency of the CPU and RAM.
