Sandy Bridge - Overclocking Bye-Bye?

[BillParrish]

The reference crystal is on board as always, its the timing chip that is embedded in the cpu die. No more board builders "spec in a clock generator chip with frequences that are adjustable to what you want".

So we are restriced to 100MHz "jumps" by changing the mulitplier and a +/- 5% adjustment unless something changes radically before release.

 

[rflcptr]

Intel's probably all-around betting on Turbo mode to satisfy most of people's demands. Then there's the K-branded chips, with their unlocked multipliers, for everyone else.

Overclocking via multiplier exclusively without worrying about bus speeds always sounded like a more stable path to "free" performance, but Extreme Edition chips' costs have historically been prohibitive.

But I normally don't overclock, so this isn't something that necessarily bothers me, either.

 

[night_2004]

The whole turbo mode thing is interesting to me really. I know why it is possible and how it works, but I'm wondering if there is a subtle hint here that we could OC a processor to xGHZ without altering the voltage?

 

[jeremyshaw]

This is physically impossible unless Intel is now shipping all their CPU's with integrated quartz frequency generators.

No, Intel if you want your pulse train from the board then god damnit I'm going to drill through the traces on the motherboard and splice in my own function generator.

edit:


no way. so what... they're doping silicon with quartz? You do still need a stone to do this right? wtf? No it must be some 3rd party chip which is just protected by the IHS...

Well, if this is the case, I wont be buying any more intel products.

Couldn't they just "wall off" the CPU's timing generator from the mobo? Or is that the genious of having the PCIe lanes on the CPU itself? Well, then let's hope nf200 is freakishly flexible...

 

[Dan_D]

We heard the doom and gloom story about Intel limiting or removing overclocking before. I doubt it will actually be the case. This never has happened before.

 

[RamonGTP]

The reference crystal is on board as always, its the timing chip that is embedded in the cpu die. No more board builders "spec in a clock generator chip with frequences that are adjustable to what you want".

So we are restriced to 100MHz "jumps" by changing the mulitplier and a +/- 5% adjustment unless something changes radically before release.

So worst case scenario is that you lose the ability to "fine tune" your overclock by 99MHz. And that's assuming a multiplier of 1x which isn't going to happen 10x is likely the minimum so you're missing out on a worst case scenario of 89MHz. And again, this is worst case so odds are it would be even less than that. AND that's with completely ignoring the benefits of multiplier overclocking such as the fact you don't have to worry about your ram or chipset being the limiting factor, so in fact multiplier overclocking can aid in HIGHER overclocks.

To sum it up, if you take a WORST case scenario AND ignore the benefits of multi overclocking, you MIGHT miss out on 89MHz of speed. That's a lot of things that need to happen for you to miss out on neglagable clock speeds incrase to begin with.

 

[rflcptr]

We heard the doom and gloom story about Intel limiting or removing overclocking before. I doubt it will actually be the case. This never has happened before.

Yeah, still waiting on actual reviews.

 

[ilkhan]

Indeed. You'll lose <100Mhz of speed. You may need s2011 to get the records, but if you were trying for a WR on s115x you were doing something wrong to begin with. You can still OC, just in 100Mhz bump. The amount of performance you lose is a negligible amount anyway.

 

[Ehren8879]

I'm wondering if we'll lose out on specific bus speed adjustments that may also improve performance. Never got into the Nehalem / Lynnfield scene here, so not sure what other clocks were present to tweak.

 

[Dan_D]

I'm wondering if we'll lose out on specific bus speed adjustments that may also improve performance. Never got into the Nehalem / Lynnfield scene here, so not sure what other clocks were present to tweak.

Not much really. When overclocking those BCLK and various voltage settings were really all you needed to adjust.

 

[E4g1e]

We heard the doom and gloom story about Intel limiting or removing overclocking before. I doubt it will actually be the case. This never has happened before.

Overclocking will not be limited by Intel per se. What's more, this isn't the first time that all of the buses on an Intel CPU platform got tied to a single base speed: Remember the 440LX (and to an extent the 440BX)? Any Front-Side Bus (FSB) overclocking above Intel's official discrete FSB speeds of the time (66MHz for the 440LX; 66 or 100 MHz for the 440BX) will pull all of the system buses out of spec.