Overclocking Performance
The underlying Haswell architecture is a known quantity. What we don't know is how well the full complement of eight cores overclocks. With the excellent Noctua NH-D15 cooler strapped on top and voltage raised from 0.976V to 1.275V in the BIOS - a conservative limit for an air-cooled processor - we overclock by synchronising all cores and raising the multiplier until the chip can no longer run the HandBrake test. Memory is kept at 2,133MHz.
We managed a stable 4.5GHz on all cores. Our contacts at well-known UK retailers informed us the average, final speed of 20 or so retail Core i7-5960X processors was around 4.6GHz, albeit with a little more voltage and watercooling, thus reinforcing our results.
Here's how the overclocked chip compares with the stock-clocked model, as benchmarked on the previous pages:
Core i7-5960X Performance |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark | Default |
Overclocked |
Percentage improvement |
|||
| PiFast (LIB) | 18.8 seconds |
15.1 |
19.7 |
|||
| Cinebench R15 (HIB) | 1,324 marks |
1,712 |
29.3 |
|||
| wPrime (LIB) | 124.4 seconds |
93.4 |
24.9 |
|||
| HandBrake (HIB) | 67.4 fps |
86.8 |
28.8 |
|||
| PCMark 8 (HIB) | 5,922 marks |
6,099 |
3.0 |
|||
| Sandra (HIB) | 15.07 points |
16.91 |
12.2 |
|||
| Cryptograph (HIB) | 10.94 GB/s |
12.73 |
16.4 |
|||
| 3DMark (HIB) | 10,195 marks |
10,447 |
2.5 |
|||
| BioShock (HIB) | 107.3 fps |
109.5 |
2.1 |
|||
| Batman: AO (HIB) | 119 fps |
122 |
2.5 |
|||
| Total War (HIB) | 99.1 fps |
99.7 |
0.6 |
|||
| Power idle (LIB) | 49 watts |
61 |
-19.7 |
|||
| Power 2D load (LIB) | 151 watts |
221 |
-31.7 |
|||
| Power 3D load (LIB) | 303 watts |
362 |
-16.3 |
|||
| LIB = lower is better HIB = higher is better |
||||||
See if your processor can beat our scores.
