The Core i7 architecture isn’t as wholeheartedly focused on extreme clock frequencies as the older Netburst architecture was, but that doesn’t mean that it is a poor overclocker, on the contrary. Pretty recently AMD showed off its 45nm Deneb architecture with a greatly overclocked AMD Phenom II X4 940 processor. AMD’s coming processor ran at speed beyond 6GHz, which is really impressive considering the last generation of AMD processors. Intel’s Core i7 processor hasn’t been able to hit the same level of frequencies but now that a new record has been set it is still a pretty extreme one.
Japanese overclocker “duck” has pushed a Core i7 Extreme Q965 processor to 5510MHz, a quite impressive increase from the stock frequency of 3.2GHz.
The motherboard used was ASUS ROG Rampage II Extreme and the record required a bus speed of 190MHz and multiplier at x29 to reach this new top result. Duck used three memory modules during his tests, but the frequency was kept low to not limit the CPU overclocking.
When our own overclocking gurus broke world records in 3DMark Vantage last weekend they used a Core i7 Extreme processor as well, but it was running at a mere 4.9GHz during the CPU tests. Core i7 is without a doubt the fastest processor on the market today and AMD will have a hard time measuring up, but then again AMD has shown that is serious about Deneb with its extreme display of overclocking. We are in for a really interesting first quarter in 2009…
