How do you overclock a i7 920?

pdiffley

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Jul 5, 2009
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Hi, I want to overclock my computer but am having some trouble finding out how to do so. I am not looking to push my computer to its absolute limits, rather want to get a nice performance increase hopefully without spending lots of time tweaking. I was hoping to get speeds around 3.5-3.7 ghz. I know that I will probably need to adjust voltages among other things, but i am not exactly sure what to alter/how much to alter it and what to leave alone. I've tried googling for help but have not had much success. Some advice on what to change and how much to change it would be great. Thankyou

CPU: i7 920
MB: Asus p6t
Ram:6GB corsair dominator
Heatsink: Thermolab Baram
 
Solution

Dude, are you determined to do this...?
The CPU runs @ 2.8 GHz.
So you don't think 3.5-3.7GHz is a big OC?
Any OC where you are increasing motherboard voltages is big.
A 'free' OC is a speed increase at default voltages, which is kewl.
Anyway, Tommy's testing has showed ~150 FSB (increased from the default 133 MHz) is a good, free OC.
That will get you 3.15 GHz.
Increase your FSB to 166 and you get 3.5 GHz, but I don't expect it will be free...
I have found that my stock i7-920 runs smokin' hot when it's working all 8 cores hard.
(It seems my Gigabyte mobo runs with the turbo-boost multiplier of...

lowriderflow

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I'm going to assume you didn't research very hard and just want someone else to do the legwork for you. Theres literally hundreds of threads and articles on toms alone about this exact thing... let alone if you fire up the google machine
 

The_OGS

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Jul 18, 2006
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Dude, are you determined to do this...?
The CPU runs @ 2.8 GHz.
So you don't think 3.5-3.7GHz is a big OC?
Any OC where you are increasing motherboard voltages is big.
A 'free' OC is a speed increase at default voltages, which is kewl.
Anyway, Tommy's testing has showed ~150 FSB (increased from the default 133 MHz) is a good, free OC.
That will get you 3.15 GHz.
Increase your FSB to 166 and you get 3.5 GHz, but I don't expect it will be free...
I have found that my stock i7-920 runs smokin' hot when it's working all 8 cores hard.
(It seems my Gigabyte mobo runs with the turbo-boost multiplier of 22 almost all the time.)
Therefore I always get 2.933 GHz CPU, so I just leave everything 'default'.
It's not just the CPU speed anyway - the whole X58 platform is already brutally fast...
Note: One must also reduce memory to the next slower setting (ie. 1333 MHz > 1066 MHz) in preparation, as memory speed will increase as the FSB is overclocked.
It's important to not push the memory beyond spec whilst attempting to push the CPU seyond spec...
Good luck,
Regards
 
Solution

pdiffley

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Jul 5, 2009
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thanks for the advice quite helpful :)
 

welshmousepk

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OGS, you really shouldn't be handing out OCing info to someone who clearly has no idea what they are doing.

if he has a low bin chip, it could be damaged. people just dont seem to understand the dangers of overclocking, and posts like yours do not help.