Overclocking: Can Sandy Bridge-E Be Made More Efficient?

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Intel's six-core processors are fast, but enthusiasts almost always want to push unlocked multipliers harder. Core i7-3960X can easily exceed 4 GHz, but what happens to power efficiency when clock rates go up? Sandy Bridge-E demonstrates weaknesses there.

Benchmark Results: Matlab

Matlab is a professional application from The MathWorks, which solves complex mathematical problems and represents them graphically. Matlab accomplishes this mostly through the use of matrices, explaining the name: it stands for MATrix LABoratory.

Not surprisingly, overclocking benefits performance in a fairly predictable way. We can be relatively certain that the workload presented to our processor is well threaded, as the test continues speeding up after the low-activity multiplier hits 47x. Bumps up from 44x, 45x, 46x, and 47x under full load demonstrate incremental speed-ups.

Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.