That Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture is good for extreme clock frequencies is pretty obvious with many air-cooled results on a good bit over 5.5 GHz. Unfortunately the maximal frequencies are held back by the limitations of the clock generator, but now the flagship Core i7-2600K has finally broken 6 GHz.
The overclocking was reached using liquid nitrogen and ASUS IV Extreme motherboard that with a multiplier setting of x56 and processor bus at 107.2 MHz. The stock bus frequency of 100 MHz is pretty much all Sandy Bridge can do without components like harddrives and USB units breaks down, but with the right CPU and motherboard Japanese overclocker Booooon reached the magic 6 GHz limit during an overclocking sessions last weekend.
Intel Core i7 2600K batch L103A975 at 6.0 GHz.
The final clock frequency landed at 6003 MHz and Booooon also managed to run through PiFast at 5994 MHz, which rseulted in the third fastest time in the world (12.25 sec), just barely beaten by Intel’s hexa-core Core i7 980X CPU at 6.9 GHz.
With the nice overclocking potential of the Sandy Bridge architecture we can’t anything but look forward to Intel’s LGA2011 platform that is slated to appear in Q4, with better bus overclocking.
Source: HWbot.org
