Overclocking
The Core 2 Duo has already gained a strong reputation as an overclocker’s dream, with some phase change experts able to push it to 5GHz using refrigeration. We’ve seen the CPU hit over 4.5GHz using a cascade phase change system, with enough stability to run whole strings of benchmarks. Even without such extravagant cooling, there’s usually plenty of extra headroom available.
We didn’t have a refrigeration system to hand, nor the time to install one. But using simple air cooling we were still able to increase the multiplier a couple of notches, merely by adding 0.05V to the core voltage. This gave us a healthy 20 per cent overclock, from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz, the results of which you can see later in this article.
