Conroe and Intels’ dualcore architecture has generally speaking been critiziced for the bottleneck the CPU bus becomes when two cores needs to share its bandwidth. Conroe, Core 2 Duo, uses a CPU bus of 1066MHz (266MHz x 4) and whether a faster CPU bus would’ve done anything for the performance maybe isn’t the easiest thing to answer. But it isn’t a problem for us to answer the question if Intels’ CPUs’ can reach higher frequencies. We’ve seen our own overclocking gurus reaching over 450MHz CPU bus (1800MHz) with the Core 2 Extreme x6800 and that was without even focusing on a high CPU bus. Now the French overclocker, md_curl has only focused on a high, extreme CPU bus and the results, well they speak for themselves.
Some days ago he set a now record in FSB overclocking, from the standard of 266MHz he overclocked his E6600 CPU to unbelievable 584MHz(!). The effective speed of this is 2337MHz which is about the same CPU frequency a standard Athlon 64 or Conroe operate at. This feat was done by lowering the multiplier on the CPU from 9x to 8x and using a cascade cooler to cool the CPU, which was an important part due to the fact that the CPU was operating at 4675MHz (~584MHz x 8).
It’s pretty obvious that Intel isn’t going to have any problems reaching a 1333MHz CPU bus on their quadcore CPUs, as it seems that there’s still some headroom.
