Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking your CPU means operating your CPU and motherboard outside of their design specifications, it can cause damage to them or kill them and may void their warranties depending on the manufacturer’s policies!
When it comes to Ivy Bridge processors there is one main difference for ambient overclockers. These things run HOT. Throughout my testing temperatures got up into the 80*C range even on a water loop. If you run on air you could have problems hitting very high clocks.
Another difference is for extreme overclockers who run sub-ambient cooling Ivy bridge processors will scale the colder the temperatures are. So that means you can run liquid nitrogen and your processor will run faster than it would on air or even phase change cooling.
For this review I stuck to 1.4v as a limit since these chips get very hot and that is a decent limit to see what kind of clocks can be achieved for daily useage.
Keep in mind that every processor is different so if I am able to hit certain clocks that does not mean you will be able to as well even with the same hardware.
CPUz Info
This chip and board would actually do 4.8ghz but temperatures caused cinebench to crash so I backed clocks down a little bit so every benchmark could finish.
3Dmark Vantage
33000 and some change is great for a quad core chip. I can’t wait to see how it will do with -50*C temperatures!
MaxxMem
That is a nice and decent bump for having the same timings. We might need to take a look and see what sort of memory speeds this platform can really do.
Cinebench 11.5
Wprime
At 4.7 the Ivy bridge platform is roughly as fast as a Sandy Bridge six-core processor at stock. Not too bad for lacking two cores.
Superpi
Memory Overclocking
I tested three sets of memory on this platform and all ran great. I must say this platform is an absolute beast if you plan on overclocking your memory. I was able to achieve 2200mhz with 8-8-8-1T timings on the previously reviewed Crucial Ballistix Elite sticks, 2200mhz with 8-8-8-1T timings and stock voltage with my Elpida Hyper based Corsair Dominator GT sticks, and the Dominator GTX8 sticks are awaiting testing as of writing but will be featured in an extreme overclocking review of this board that will follow soon.
