A Summer Road Trip With the Intel Core i7 975 EE: Debrief
 Like all road trips, it does feel good to be home. As much fun as benching all day on various cooling mediums with different hardware setups is, sitting down and doing nothing sure feels nice right now. With that said, the results we have provided are most definitely worth the effort involved. Let's do a brief recap of what we accomplished on this road trip. First up was basic air cooling that everyone has access to and a Thermalright Ultra-120 variant matched with a couple fans was able to achieve rather impressive overclocks. The fully stable overclock of 4.36GHz is at the upper end of the spectrum we believe for air cooling. We won't speculate on what could be an average overclock on air with Core i7 975 EE processors because that would simply be wreckless on our behalf. Overclocking is a matter of luck, skill, and effort with a great number of variables. Good batches of chips will clock higher than ours, bad batches will clock lower. Just remember, our results are from a single engineering sample and shouldn't be the expectation of all i7 975 EE retail purchases.
As for the benchmarking clocks we managed with air cooling, we were quite surprised by what was possible. The low temperatures of our particular processor allowed for much higher voltages to be used than we initially anticipated. Some of the D0 stepping processors available right now do not run this cool, as demonstrated by our Core i7 920 retail processor with a date code of 3845B026. Our 920, and a number of other users with the same or similar date codes have reported high temperatures that would never allow 1.5v vCORE to be used with air cooling like we could with the i7 975 EE processor. Again, processors can vary greatly from one chip to the next and expectations should always be kept in check when making a purchase.  As we moved on to colder temperatures in the way of our single stage phase change unit, we witnessed a coming alive of this processor at operating temperatures of -20C to -35C. Single threaded applications didn't tax the phase change unit and it was able to hold the temperature load well enough to allow for some really solid overclocks with our processor. As we increased the processor load with multiple cores in use, we saw the phase change fall to its knees. There are a number of phase change units available on the market and we would liken our unit to that of a commercial Asetek or Mach II unit. As always though, results vary greatly depending on variables like the motherboard in use, and the user’s ability to find correct voltage combinations to maximize a CPU. This effort is no more evident than during our liquid nitrogen benchmarking.
With the ability to cool the processor to its useful limits, liquid nitrogen cooling is the ultimate benchmarking medium for the Core i7 family of processors. Our results were continually in the top 20 globally on HWBot.org due to a lot of work and effort on our part. Careful hardware matching such as our choice in motherboard and memory played a large role in these results, not to mention the rather gaudy performance seen from mating four HD4890's together in CrossFireX. We simply wanted to showcase the Core i7 975 EE processor here today and not provide a platform for people to make purchasing decisions from. This means that we don't want you to go out and spend a thousand dollars on an i7 975 EE processor based on our results expecting to achieve the same numbers we have. Overclocking doesn't work like that, especially at the level we benched at during this road trip.
After all of that has been said, if you are contemplating the purchase of a Core i7 975 processor at this time there are simply a couple things we can guarantee. You will be buying the best performing retail processor available on the market today. You will have the pleasure of an unlocked CPU multiplier that can only be found on Extreme Edition processors from Intel. And you will be in a great position to really push things with sub ambient cooling...but the price tag comes with no guarantees.
Now that our "summer vacation" is over, time to get back to work I guess. Look for a review of the OCZ Blade memory we used today to hit the pages of HardwareCanucks.com shortly. We would like to thank Intel for making this road trip possible and really appreciate the ability to take this Core i7 975 to the limits and beyond. 
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