Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Overclocking Results

Tada!...


Ok, pick your jaw off of the floor. This is merely a 'suicide' screenshot, which is what far too many sites do. There is obviously zero stability at this frequency, and we used more vCore voltage than the 1.40V absolute maximum that Intel specifies in the Gulftown whitepaper, which isn't good especially when you are using air-cooling like we are. Silliness aside, let's move onto the stable overclocks.

Highest Stable CPU Overclock

Since this is after all a brand new $999 processor, we self-imposed a 1.35V-ish maximum during our preliminary overclocking sessions with this processor. With the unlocked multipliers overclocking was obviously a breeze, as we could merely increase the CPU multiplier as needed and adjust the BCLK to extract those last few megahertz.

We were fairly satisfied with our results. Yes, you can get somewhat similar clocks at similar voltage from a cherry Core i7-9xx D0, but those tend to run exceedingly hot. Our sample ran fairly cool, peaking in the upper 70C's during LinX. Furthermore, we suspect that we have a relatively early sample since ours was manufactured in 2009 while all the other i7-980X's that we've seen were made in 2010. Combine this with the fact that Intel's review sample E.S chips are never really great overclockers, and I'm willing to go on a limb and say that the retail processors will be able to achieve a solid 100-200Mhz more than our sample at a similar voltage.

Highest Stable BCLK Overclock

On the BCLK-front, we achieved 216Mhz, which is good but isn't a huge improvement over what Bloomfield's are capable of. Having said that, the motherboard is obviously a potential bottleneck. Further testing is needed on another motherboard.