Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record 113
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:Stoopid. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Really, by the time you hit the edge of the lifetime, your chip's performance would be worth replacing anyway.
Re:Stoopid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Overclocking rarely causes damage. If you gradually increase the speed, you'll hit the point where your computer isn't stable. However, this is well before the point where you cause permanent damage. 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?
Re:Stoopid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, back in the day, it was the opposite of stupid. I bumped my old K6-III by 25%. I used it for video transcoding and a 25% increase in performance was huge. It could take a full day to do a high quality multi-pass of an hour of video. Shaving 5 or 6 hours off that was kind of a big deal. Sorry you couldn't figure out how to do it right.
Underclocking (Score:4, Interesting)