Liquid nitrogen, baby!

Having tested this particular sample on phase-change cooling which was, obviously, not such a satisfying session, we had mixed hopes when driving home the 25L dewar filled with liquid nitrogen.



On the one hand, there's the hope that this particular sample would turn out to be a killer chip, matching the other Gulftown overclocking results and going way beyond 6GHz 6c 12t stable through multithreaded benchmarks such as 3DMark Vantage and Wprime 1024M. On the other hand, there was the fear that this B1 would be pretty similar to what other people had reached with this revision of the Gulftown: no 6GHz, bad coldbug ranges and in overall disappointing.

First, let me show you the results of the test session and I'll comment on the results afterwards.

Test setup: Pictures





Test results

Coldbootbug: -85°C

Coldbug: -123°C

More on the temperature on the next page.

3DMark03 at 208x27 = 5617MHz (HT off): 113145

3DMark05 at 200x28 = 5600MHz (HT off): 43959

Aquamark3 at 215x27 = 5810MHz (HT off): 404584

SuperPI 1M at 200x28 = 5600MHz (HT on): 7.375 seconds

SuperPI 32M at 207x28 = 5803MHz (HT on): 6 minutes 36.469 seconds

Pifast at 215x28 = 6014MHz (HT on): 14.17 seconds

Wprime 32M at 207x28 = 5803MHz (HT on): 2.75 seconds

Wprime 1024M at 207x28 = 5601MHz (HT on): 1 minute 29.234 seconds

The most important information of this article you can find on the next page as we sum up our thoughts and findings regarding the overclockability of the Intel Core i7 980X. In the end, we cannot be unhappy with 6GHz benchmark stable since the Bloomfield only allowed us to go to 5.4GHz at most. A lot of these results are now entries in the top-20 overall rankings over at HWBOT, so ... it was a good first session.

At this point I'd also like to point your attention to the clock frequencies of the graphics card, the MSI R5870 Lightning. Although we are still in the test phase before the article, it's already quite impressive to see a solid 1425MHz core frequency. An article should pop online in the next couple of weeks.