Overclocking the beast

The few enthusiasts with pockets deep enough to justify a £680 chip will likely engage in a bout of overclocking. Tinkering around with various voltages and settings - disabling Turbo Boost and adding 10 per cent to most lines, for starters - and placing the fan in performance mode, we managed to get the chip stable at 4.08GHz.

We expect all Intel 900-series chips to break through the 4GHz barrier with a bit of coaxing in the BIOS, and the engineering-sample 980X ran through 4.2GHz with consummate ease, so the final clock-speed of the full-retail 970 comes as a slight disappointment: we had visions of 4.3GHz-plus.

So what do 12 threads operating at 4.08GHz perform like? Glad you asked.

4GHz-plus of Gulftown power speaks for itself, and it gets close to doubling the stock performance of a six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1055T.

But the cost of such speed is an extra power-draw of 46W on the already-high juice consumption.

Intel Core i7 970 CPU review: six cores for £680

Overclocking the beast

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