No Volkswagen Beetle Here
 As mentioned, this road trip won't involve any Volkswagen Beetles, no Jeep Wagoneers, and certainly no mid 70's Buick Estate Wagons draped in beautiful wood paneling. Our sole mode of transportation for this road trip is going to be on the back of the latest and fastest retail processor from Intel.
The new Core i7 975 EE is not simply a clock increase from the previous top dog holder Core i7 965 EE. The 975 sports the new die spin known as stepping D0, while the 965 is based on the core stepping C0. There are no reported performance differences between the two steppings but some refinements to the process have resulted in a marginally better overclocking strain of silicon...or at least the early reports tend to suggest. Core i7 920 D0's have been out on the market for a while now and the best batches of the 920 D0's seem to definitely offer higher overclocks than the previous C0 stepping 920's so the potential for higher overclocks is there, but certainly not guaranteed. Let's have a quick look at the specification sheet of our ride today, the Core i7 975 EE.  The only differences in specifications between the Core i7 975 EE and 965 EE are the default multiplier resulting in a 133MHz bump in frequency at stock, and a small change to the VID Voltage Range. The i7 965 EE is listed as having a VID Voltage Range of 0.80v~1.375v. Above, we can see the i7 975 EE listed up to only 1.225v as a maximum. This means that the default voltage range will average rather significantly lower on the new D0 process indicating either better yields or a slightly more efficient resulting silicon. Other than that though, the specs are the same with simple changes to sSpec and CPUID String. A physical look at the two processors indicates no changes either as the photos below illustrate.   From above there are no physical changes to the IHS or the substrate. Underneath the story is the same. On the left is the Core i7 975 EE and on the right is the Core i7 965 EE. They are identical in every way, aside from the slight color difference of the contact pads. Over time and use, the pads on the processor start to orange up a little bit, hence the difference in color between the two.
Obviously we are dealing with just a revision of the original Core i7 processors as is the case with the D0 stepping i7 920 and the new i7 950 that has been launched at the same time as the i7 975. From an end user point of view, the i7 975 really shouldn't provide any benefit over the i7 965 and if you are already running the first i7 EE chip, there really is no reason to upgrade. For benchmarkers and overclockers, however, this isn't quite the case. With overclocking, results will always vary, but the D0 stepping has proven to be a much stronger clocker and continually outpaces limits of the average C0 counterpart. There are still isolated cases of C0 i7 965's clocking higher than many i7 975's but that is the nature of overclocking; there are no blanket statements or black & white rules, only averages and plenty of grey area. So even though our focus in this article is going to be the overclocking, our results are simply a single sample out of the thousands of Core i7 975 EE processors out there. Our results shouldn't be considered the best, worst, or possibly not even the average...they are simply going to be a single set of overclocking results on different cooling mediums from a single engineering sample. Let's now find out who else will be joining us on this road trip. This portion of our trip will be very similar to the summer road trips of our youth as we are going to be jamming everything that will possibly fit into this journey. | 
