It seems that the new stepping for the Intel Core i7 series will be a good one for overclockers; on air this D0 sample hit 4.6Ghz (up from 2.66Ghz at default) and the system is stable enough to run 3DMark06, far from bad! Considering that our guys in Prague yesterday were running Core i7 under LN2 and reaching 4.9~5Ghz 3D stable.


Motherboard used was a DFI DK X58 T3eH6 and OCZ Reaper DDR3-1866 6GB; you can see the full screengrabs at the source

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Of course there are C0 stepping CPUs which do 4.6-4.7Ghz too on air cooling, but not all of them are able to; so far D0 reports are all very similar to this finding.

if you check the Core i7 920 ranking at HWBot here, you'll notice that the 99% of those with higher than 4.5ghz results are using H20 or better cooling

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Really makes me wonder what the Core i7 950 and 975 can do...

Core i7 950 has a 23x multiplier over the 920's 20x. That's enough for 5Ghz at the same 220Mhz QPI link. Or 5.23Ghz with Turbo mode, as the screenie above is using Turbo Mode.