Intel's senior performance analyst François Piednoel was in attendance at CES this year and demonstrated Core i7's overclocking abilities using a standard water-cooling setup.

Despite Phenom II being seen at speeds of above 6GHz using extreme cooling methods, François' main reason for doing this was to show that Core i7 offers better overclocking potential than AMD's Phenom II when sticking to traditional water-cooling.

The setup comprised an Intel "Smackover" DX58SO motherboard, Core i7 processor with its vCore at 1.44v and the Northbridge voltage set to 1.21v. His end result was just over 4.6GHz using a bus speed of 144 MHz x 32.

Intel's own desktop control-center software was used to monitor the performance and temperatures during the task. Temps show to have been a tad toasty at 61c on the CPU, but stable nonetheless. The CPU's VRM was at 31c whilst the X58 chipset was sitting at 41c.