The 5 GHz, Six-Core Project: Core i7-980X Gets Chilly

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Tom’s Hardware has been ringing the 5 GHz bell for years, yet those efforts have never yielded a practical daily-use solution. Today we take a look at how far off-the-shelf parts can take us with an ambitious 5 GHz, six-core overclocking project.

Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding

Moving past the painfully monotonous gaming benchmarks, applications are where the Core i7 shines. Apple iTunes isn’t the best example, with its inability to use every CPU core, but at least it responds favorably to our overclocking efforts.

HandBrake and TMPGEnc show no loss for disabling Intel Hyper-Threading (HT) at 5 GHz, instead handing that configuration a huge 50% performance lead.

MainConcept puts the fastest HT-enabled speed in the lead by 31%, the 5 GHz overclock giving up 12% of its expected performance through the loss of its virtual cores.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.