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Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 5.04GHz

New Overclocking Milestone for the Unannounced CPU

by Aleksey Razin

[ 06/26/2006 | 04:29 PM ]

We have already posted a few reports about the extreme overclocking achievements of some guys from Sweden. They experimented with Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) pretty successfully and it was absolutely clear that the Scandinavian guys will not stop until they set the world record. In fact, they have already set a few “records”, but the biggest one would certainly be the highest CPU core clock.

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As far as I understand, the absolute overclocking record and at the same time the Super PI / mod1.4 record still belongs to the Japanese enthusiasts, who managed to speed up their Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor to 5.013GHz. The Pi calculation with 1 million digits precision at this speed was completed within 10.140 seconds.

Note that the Swedish candidates for world record used Core 2 Extreme X6800 C1 stepping processor that demonstrates phenomenal overclocking potential even with air cooling. Why did they manage to go only as far as 4.95GHz?

It turns out that the BIOS of ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (i975X) mainboard didn’t allow raising the system bus frequency beyond 450MHz. The moment they got new BIOS that shifted this peak to 500MHz, the world record was set.

Nordic Hardware site reported that they hit the 5.04GHz frequency with liquid nitrogen cooling of down to -125C. They worked with Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) CPU with C1 core stepping.

The Vcore was raised to 1.73V, but as for the clock frequency multiplier, they couldn’t increase it because of the limitations in the mainboard BIOS. Therefore they overclocked the CPU by increasing the system bus frequency to 458MHz. The system completed the Super PI / mod1.5 XS test the results of PI calculation with up to 1 million digits precision in 10.234 seconds. Of course, this is not the world record yet, but they still got time.

I would like to say that this time the CPU worked in dual-core mode, while the Japanese overclockers disabled one of the cores to hit the 5.0GHz bar. The coldbug for this particular processor sat at -128C. No doubt that these results will get even better within the next days, because the mainboard and its BIOS remain the bottleneck preventing the frequency from going further up.