The overclock
So where does the extra £30 go? It buys you some overclocking mojo from the 3XS team.Shipping with a clock-speed of 2.93GHz and lacking the Turbo Boost on other Clarkdale processors, one obvious method of pushing the chip farther is to overclock it by pushing up the BCLK.
Here's the Core i3 530 system at stock speeds.
Nothing surprising here. The chip runs with a 22x multiplier and 133MHz BCLK. Set the memory-multiplier to 10x in the BIOS and the Corsair RAM operates at 1,333MHz.
The SMART bundle ships with two profiles in the BIOS: default and Scan 3XS OC. Access the second one by pressing F12, save and reload the operating system and you're presented with this:
The overclock is transparent to the user, insofar as the BIOS-loading feature sets all the parameters. The chip's multiplier is knocked down to 20x and BCLK raised to an impressive 200MHz, to hit 4GHz. Memory-multiplier is reduced to 8x, translating to the DDR3 running at 1,600MHz CL9 (ignore CPU-Z).
Here's how it shapes up in the BIOS.
Everything hunk-dory. You could set the frequencies yourself and qualify the platform at 4GHz, saving yourself £30, but Scan takes the guesswork out of doing so. Each system is stress tested for a number of hours, including concurrent GPU and CPU loading, and then the bundle, BIOS settings, temperatures, and start-up cycles are manually checked before shipping out to the customer, Scan says.
