Intel Sandy Bridge CPU In-Depth Look at Overclocking, Memory Timings and More

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2011-02-01

First introduced at the CES, Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPU architecture is here to flood the mainstream market with over 25 CPUs. Don't panic, most are foreseen for the mobile market and only 9 new models will be introduced for the desktop segment. Coinciding with this new release is also a new socket design. 1155 pins will be the new standard for Intel’s mainstream lineup. Yes you guessed it, Sandy bridge is here to replace socket 1156. Slowly but steadily Clarkdale and Lynnfield will become End Of Life and will be phased out. At the Sandy Bridge Tech conference the representatives of Intel said that the current S1366 i7 lineup (Bloomfield and Gulftown) will remain their high end platform. Time to explore Sandy Bridge...

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2133Mhz showing its colours

2133Mhz was the highest divider that allowed me to boot with the Corsair GTX2 Hyper kit at 1.67Vdimm. I had to loosen TRCD to 8 to get the ram kit Superpi 32M stable ( all the other tests ran fine with 7 setting ) The next divider 2400 was a no boot, not even with the loosest timings on the rams... Let's go on with the show :

 

 

SuperPi 1m and Wprime32 are almost identical to the lower 1866 divider. We need more raw CPU power to get better scores. But that's not the intention of this particular test. 

 

 

SuperPi 32M benefits nicely from the extra bandwidth provided. Over 4 secs compared to the  1866 ram divider. So it is crystal clear that those that want maximum performance clock for clock, high speed rams is the way to go ! And if you can or ya wallet allows it, opt for tight timings too !

 

 

AIDA64 shows that Copy, Read and Write still manage to increase with the 2133 divider. And it's all so easy to setup. With my 2500K ES sample I did not have to increase the VCSSA voltage. Some other claimed they needed to up VSCCA voltage a bit to get 2133 stable. Tighter timings still boost even further...

 

 

Tighter timings almost have got zero benefit for the HD file encoding X264HD test. We already saw sort of a limit being reached with the previous 1866 divider test.

 

 

PCMark05 however does gain a mind blowing 250 points (sorry bit of sarcasm involved).

 

 

With Cinebench we ran into a few discrepancies at these speeds. Cas8-9 results very very close to 1866. Cas 7 was faster in the single core test at 2133, though multi core was time after time faster at 1866Mhz.

 

 

Our two futuremark 3D tests, still continue to improve with more ram speed. 3dmark06 is barely improving (GPU limited with the GTX 285) , but hey every gain counts. 3DMark01 tops at 59.6K. Compared to the slowest 1333mhz setting almost 2000 points gain.

 

 

Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 continues to impress me. Give it more CPU, more bandwidth and it still continues to pump out more FPS. Of Course we are running only at 1280 x 1024, albe it  with very high detail setting selected. Adding more AA, higher resolutions will put a damper on our joy, as the frames will stabilise sooner and the GPU will turn into the bottleneck. Mafia II finally reaches scores over 127FPS.

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Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/02
52x102 here with flares at 2176-6/9/6/24
SuperPi and Pifast stable.
Comment from leeghoofd @ 2011/02/02
So use these clocks too then for 3D Pascal
Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/02
Yes my master.
Comment from thorgal @ 2011/02/03
So which settings did you use for 5Ghz It's those "just a few settings" that interest me

I always want to learn from a master
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2011/02/04
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teemto View Post
Yes my master.
Is the system stable in 3DMark 2005 CPU test too at those frequencies?
Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/04
Nope. That's realy the max I could go.
Haven't played around with the other voltages though.
Maybe Albrecht can shed some light if this could improve stability/OC'ability?

 

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