Intel’s Core i5-655K & Core i7-875K: Overclocked and Analyzed
by Rajinder Gill on May 28, 2010 5:00 AM ESTOk, so we got a little carried away on the Clarkdale stuff. Time to give the i7-875K a look-see. After all, it’s probably the bigger story of the K-series release given it offers more overclocking features and a similar stock clock speed to the more expensive i7-870.
No beating around on this one, we started off with watercooling:
Without water-cooling, there isn’t much headroom at all - at least not on this sample. Our i7-870 ES manages 4.4GHz, pulling 201 Watts during Linpack. The 875-K is already at 193 watts, and it has barely broken 4GHz. Past 3.9GHz, we’re already looking at a 10W increase in power consumption for every 20 MHz rise in CPU frequency - let’s just say that this did not encourage us to push any further. Well, that’s not completely true because we did try it out under our cascades. Unfortunately, things are pretty bad in the sub-zero realms, too. The substrate can’t handle more than 1.35Vcore when cooled below -70 Celsius, making it a difficult chip to control and one that’s ultimately limited in headroom. The best we managed was a run of Vantage at 4.5GHz, which really isn’t worth bragging about.
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ehume - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I finally got around to getting the 875k. Using the brand new Real Temp 3.60, I can now adjust the Turbo Boost multipliers so that under load all four cores go to 30x. That means with a bclk of 134MHz I now see a cpu clock range from 1206MHz on idle to 4020MHz on load. Nice.But Intel advertised an adjustable memory multiplier as well. Since my memory is rated at DDR3-2000 I would like to push it beyond the 1608MHz that 12x134 allows. So, is it possible to push the memory multiplier beyond 12x? Does the 875k have that in it?
I have checked a number of reviews and found nothing other than a repetition of Intel's statements that the memory multiplier is unlocked. Well, is it?