Introduction:



About a month and a half ago, Intel released its newest high-end dual core processor, the E8500 Wolfdale. Madshrimps already reviewed and overclocked the E8500, but that was only an engineering sample. The new retail chips might be better when it comes to overclocking and that's exactly what we're going to find out!



Test setup and methodology

Blind's Intel E8500 Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core2Duo E8500 - 3167MHz Intel Core2Duo E8500 OC air - 4400MHz Intel Core2Duo E8500 OC cascade - around 5200MHz Intel Core2Duo E8500 OC ln² - around 5300MHz
Cooling	Scythe Mugen + Thermaltake 1200rpm fan Custom 2stage Cascade (-100°C) K|ngp|n's Dragon F1 EE
Mainboard	Abit IP35 Pro (vdroop modified)
Memory	2 * 1GB OCZ Reaper PC9200
Other	XFX 9800GTX OCZ Proxstream 1KW Mactor 320GB HDD Windows XP SP3

The benchmarks we chose to run were those of the HWBot benchmark suite to help our Overclocking Team with more point and higher ranking!

Cpu-z

PiFast

Superpi 1M

Superpi 32M

Wprime 32M

Wprime 1024M

3DMark06 CPU test

Cinebench R10

Voltage selection

Underneath, you find the voltage settings that worked best for Blind's setup when talking the maximum possible overclock. To tune your system further, you might want to play with the GTL+ voltage settings; for 45nm CPUs, it's important to find the ideal spots.



Let's check out the results ->