#Intel s cpu overclockabl upgrade#
To be fair, though, AHCI isn’t entirely important for most people, but enthusiasts may wish to upgrade to H57 for the sake of adding it in (the difference in chipset price is $3, with the H57 model also including 2 additional USB ports and PCI-E lanes).īefore jumping into our overclocking results, you can quickly review our test machine specifications if you wish:
This is seemingly beyond ASUS’ control, and it seems that it’s a feature that will be completely limited to H57 motherboards. Like the model name suggests, this board uses Intel’s H55 chipset, which means the only “major” feature it’s lacking is AHCI. The robust feature-set and tweaking-ability that’s found on ASUS’ desktop boards is found here, and when using it, it certainly doesn’t feel scaled down in any way, and that’s about to be proven in a minute with our impressive stable overclock. This was the board that I used throughout almost all of my Clarkdale testing, and after all my experience, I can say that it’s absolute quality. Overclocking the CPUĪs just mentioned, our test board is ASUS’ P7H55D-M EVO, one of the company’s mainstream offerings that’s likely to cost around ~$130 when it hits the store shelves (this is an estimate, I have no clue whatsoever, I just can’t imagine a mainstream mATX board being much higher).
In the case of our P7H55D-M EVO board from ASUS, the feature was there, so we took advantage of it and overclocked both the CPU and GPU. Fortunately, Intel made it so that overclocking the CPU has no effect whatsoever on the GPU, and both use their own voltages and can be overclocked in the motherboard BIOS, should the vendor provide the support. Overclocking the CPU may not involve a far different process than what we’re used to, but another factor at play is of course the integrated GPU (IGP). This cooler is a bit more expensive than the competition, but it’s as good as they come for the LGA1156 platform. For this article, like our previous overclocking-focused articles, I’ll be using a regular air cooler for all benchmarking, which in this case is Thermalright’s MUX-120. For us here, though, I’m more interested in finding a stable overclock won’t result in raising your room temperatures by 15☏ or so. Most often, you won’t even have to touch the voltages yourself, unless you want to go really high. You have to worry about the BCLK (Base Clock), along with the CPU ratio. If you’re familiar at all with how Lynnfield is overclocked, then Westmere is pretty much no different. With Westmere, not too much changes on the overclocking front.
#Intel s cpu overclockabl Pc#
This varies from application to application, but for the most part, if you do anything on your PC that takes minutes, tens of minutes, hours, or even longer to execute, overclocking can prove hugely beneficial.
If you have a project that takes 5 hours to render, then a 25% overclock could render it in almost 1/4th of the time. One example I like to fall back on is 3D rendering. The fact is, an overclocked processor will take care of these processes faster. Here, though, more and more people are pushing their processors harder than ever, from doing simple tasks like photo editing to more complex tasks such as video editing.
Just because you can do something, though, it doesn’t mean you should. Both AMD and Intel are delivering processors that almost beg to be overclocked, and in some cases, even a 25% or higher frequency boost ends up being stable on an air cooler… that’s impressive. It used to be that overclocking was left to those who didn’t mind risking their components, or genuinely needed a speed boost, but today, I feel like that mentality has changed a little. No matter how inexpensive or expensive, exciting or boring a processor may be, one surefire way to excite the senses is by taking your brand new toy and overclocking the heck out of it. In our tests, Westmere, and Clarkdale specifically, proved much faster than the previous generation in a lot of ways, especially when the AES-NI instruction set is brought into things. So far, Westmere has given us only dual-core models, but all feature HyperThreading, so while it may not be a quad-core, you’re still getting that huge multi-threading ability. Nehalem for everyone is finally here, and it’s about time. To preface this article, I’d like to recommend checking out our in-depth look at Intel’s latest microarchitecture, Clarkdale, which was posted earlier this week.
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