Ivy Bridge-E Overclocking With EVGA And Corsair

I did an article on overclocking the Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 4930K using an EVGA X79 Dark and was very impressed with the performance.  I suspect my chip isn't that good but LN2 results could improve and with the new BIOS images being released since then I'm sure my chip could do better..

It has been a while since I personally have setup a bench, rolled up my sleeves and built a test system with top-shelf components, a fresh OS install and some overclocking mojo. However, Intel's recent release of Ivy Bridge-E gave us a hankering to do just that. We've been testing a lot of tablets, smartphones and Ultrabooks but there's a satisfaction with building a high performance system from the ground up, that you just don't get from pre-built devices...

EVGA recently took the wraps off a new high-end X79 motherboard dubbed the X79 Dark and its black PCB with red accents, as it turned out, matched quite nicely with Corsair's Vengeance Pro series memory and H90 water cooler. But we needed stable clean power too, so we enlisted an EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G2 power supply to offer up the juice.  All told, with an OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPs SSD for storage, we ended up with quite a test platform to explore the out limits of clock speed with Intel's Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E six-core processor.

I do hate it when hardware reviewers claim that they don't use top shelf components and then set out to do an overclocking article.  Not to mention their 3.6Ghz overclock?  WTF??  At least I was able to hit 5Ghz+ and prove that IVB-E can be a viable overclocking platform.

Related Web URL: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Ivy-BridgeE-Overclo...