Overclocked Performance
Intel has most likely been conservative in the frequencies mandated for the Core i7-6950X, but how well do the 10 cores overclock? With the excellent Noctua NH-D15 cooler strapped on top and voltage raised from the default 0.976V to 1.3V in the BIOS - a conservative limit for an air-cooled processor - we overclocked by synchronising all cores and raising the multiplier until the chip could no longer run the HandBrake test. Memory was kept at 2,400MHz.
We managed a stable 4.3GHz on all cores. Running a couple of bins higher would require significantly more voltage to be pumped through the chip, an unsafe amount with air cooling, so the final, overclocked speed isn't as fast as the 4.5GHz obtained on the Core i7-5960X using the same procedure, albeit different motherboard. Running pure AVX workloads reduced the overclock to just 4.1GHz, mind.
Running the full roster of benchmarks again, here's how the overclocked chip compares with the stock-clocked model, as benchmarked on the previous pages:
Core i7-6950X Stock/Overclocked Performance |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark | Default |
Overclocked |
Percentage improvement (faster/higher) |
|||
| PiFast (LIB) | 18.8 seconds |
15.5 |
17.6 |
|||
| Cinebench R15 (HIB) | 1,749 marks |
2,205 |
26.0 |
|||
| wPrime (LIB) | 93.0 seconds |
73.9 |
20.5 |
|||
| HandBrake (HIB) | 80.0fps |
103.7 |
29.6 |
|||
| 3DMark (HIB) | 17,703 marks |
18,857 |
6.5 |
|||
| Diry Rally (HIB) | 146.2 fps |
152.2 |
4.1 |
|||
| ROTTR (HIB) | 137 fps |
137.3 |
0.2 |
|||
| The Divison (HIB) | 96.3 fps |
97.0 |
0.7 |
|||
| Power idle (LIB) | 47 watts |
49 |
-4.2 |
|||
| Power 2D load (LIB) | 125 watts |
228 |
-82.4 |
|||
| Power 3D load (LIB) | 219 watts |
289 |
-31.9 |
|||
| LIB = lower is better HIB = higher is better |
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Adding frequency and a whole heap of voltage doesn't play well in terms of load power consumption, but the Noctua cooler is easily up to the task of keeping the CPU below 75°C when under the pump.
Stressing all the cores yields an extra 25 per cent or so, and it's the first time a Core i7 has broken the 2,000-mark barrier in Cinebench. This is fast going at crazy-fast speeds.
