How To: Get A 4 GHz Dual-Core For $120

From 3.16 GHz to Almost 4 GHz

Overclocks Without Voltage Increase

FSB1333 speed will take the 2.53 GHz E7200 to 3.16 GHz immediately—you don’t have to modify many settings. Should your motherboard offer automatic adjustment of processor settings, it will also automatically introduce a slight voltage increase. This worked well on an MSI P45 Diamond, and on Asus and Gigabyte motherboards using the same chipset.

This time we took the processor to the maximum clock speed we’d reached with Core 2 Duo processors without voltage increase—3.4 GHz. Consequently, we set the FSB speed from 333 MHz to 360 MHz, and received an effective 3.41 GHz clock speed at FSB1436 according to CPU-Z 1.46.

Overclocking without increasing voltage is safe as long as the overclocking settings are reliable. We recommend checking system stability using demanding tools such as Prime95 or the burn-in feature of SiSoft Sandra.

3.6 GHz (FSB1520)

We couldn’t reach 3.6 GHz reliably without modifying the voltage settings, as the automatic configuration of the MSI P45 Diamond didn’t increase the voltage sufficiently. So we manually selected 1.35 V, which CPU-Z reported to be at 1.328 V. At this point we operated the system at a 380 MHz base clock speed, which equals FSB1520. The system started properly, and was as stable as it could be—we experienced no problems whatsoever during several hours of play with the test machine.