Overclocking

This is what we really want to know about. How fast can we get it to go? - Well, our first dive into this was a quick try at 196x23. Here we pushed the multiplier one over the stock setting and also pushed the BCLK up by a good bit.

We were happily surprised when the system not only posted, but let us into Windows! We were able to run CPU-Z as well; however, when we started our test run things fell apart very quickly. Even opening Cinebench R11.5 caused the system to crash and reboot.

We began working backwards from 4.5GHz and ended up with a stable clock of 186x22 (4.092GHz). This is a little bit over our fastest 1156 i7 OC (at 3.8GHz), but not that much.

All of this was on AIR cooling, so we do have a feeling that with more advanced cooling we could have gotten much more out of this CPU. We do hope to return to it and test this theory in the very near future.

You can check out the validation link for the new i7 875K here.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.