Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record

MojoKid writes "Renowned overclocker 'Hicookie' achieved a new high clock speed on the Intel Core i7 3930K processor by cranking the chip past 5.6GHz using a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, the first mobo in the world to achieve a mulitplier of 57x. There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke. Gigabyte released a BIOS update for several of its X79 boards to prevent such incidents from happening, and there were outcries that the new F7 BIOS would ... [reduce] overclocking performance; Hicookie's achievement should erase those concerns."

Re:only 2 cores enabled.

[jibjibjib]

For some applications 2 cores at 5.6GHz are better than any number of cores at 3GHz.

Re:Stoopid.

[adolf]

As long as you stay reasonable (don't change voltages) you're getting a good performance gain for free. Why not get a 30% performance boost?

Because some of us would rather pay more to get a 30% performance boost without fiddling about trying to gauge system stability, and others of us are happy enough with the out-of-the-box stable systems that we have by default.

I've done my share of overclocking (having first overclocked a 386SX from 33MHz to 40MHz, a P100 to 120, and then some K6-2s from 300 to 350), but lately I'd rather just have a system that is both reliable and that doesn't need fucking-with.

YMMV.

Re:Stoopid.

[drsmithy]

Obviously you're misinformed, since a gentle overclock, say a few hundred Mhz, is well within the average chip capacity, with no appreciable impact on chip lifespan compared to the gain.

Such a small overclock will also have no appreciable impact on performance, either, outside of benchmarks.