Overclocking Performance
With the excellent Noctua NH-D15 cooler strapped on top and voltage raised from 1.0V to 1.275V in the BIOS - a conservative limit for an air-cooled processor - we overclocked by synchronising all cores and raising the multiplier until the chip can no longer run the HandBrake test. Memory is kept at 2,133MHz. The retail chip managed an all-core 4.5GHz (45x100MHz) with excellent stability.
It's a question of cores and threads against frequency. Narrowly beating the Core i7-5960X when the six-core chip is overclocked, spending a little time in the BIOS provides a 20 per cent-plus improvement.
Another case of slipping by the headline processor.
Extra frequency is only so helpful in certain games. A clean sweep for the overclocked Core i7-5930K by the smallest of margins.
Yet it's not quite fair to compare on performance numbers alone. Overclocking the chip increases 2D power consumption from 152W to 222W and 3D load numbers from 299W to 359W.
