VIDEO: 6GHz plus: Overclocking the E8600 with liquid nitrogen

Posted at: Tuesday 2nd September 2008 by Antony Leather

CustomPC and BenchTec overclocked the Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 as far as it could go

The next milestone we achieved was a score of 7.7 seconds, with the E8600 clocked at 6.05GHz. After this, Paul and Barry managed to push the E8600 to 6.07GHz and Corsair Dominator DDR3 PC18000 up to 972MHz (1.94GHz effective). We managed to keep memory timings at 7-6-5-15 and still successfully complete a run of SuperPI 1M.

The fastest speed they achieved with this setup was 7.6 seconds, one of the shortest times to calculate one million decimal places of PI we've ever seen. Paul and Barry were able to boot into Windows with the E8600 running even faster, at 6.16GHz using an FSB speed of 616MHz but as we were running out of time, there wasn't enough time to ensure the system was stable. With some more tweaks, the E8600 could go even further.

The day had been an outstanding success. We had achieved an 85% overclock for a CPU that already is no slouch with a default clock speed of 3.33GHz.

We'd like to thank Intel for providing us with a huge set of CPUs to test, Asus for providing the Rampage Extreme motherboard, Corsair for providing the memory and Armari for being an excellent host.