Overclocking Intel's Wolfdale E8000

First Step: 400 MHz FSB And 3.8 GHz

The Core 2 Duo E8500 processor reaches its 3.16 GHz core clock speed by multiplying the system speed of 333 MHz times 9.5. In the first step, we increased the bus speed to 400 MHz (FSB1600), which will be the default clock speed for the next Intel chipset generation (X48 and P45 aka Eaglelake and Bearlake). Multiplied by 9.5, this resulted in a core clock speed of 3.8 GHz, which ran absolutely stable at all times.

A clock speed of 3800 MHz was not much of a problem for the Wolfdale sample. The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 automatically increased the supply voltage from the default of 1.225 V to 1.345 V.

We set the memory to a 1:1 ratio in order to stay at the default 400 MHz clock speed of DDR2-800.