Core i7 breaks all CPC benchmark records on air

Posted at: 5:53pm 3rd November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

A Core i7 965 Extreme overclocked to 4.27GHz takes the number 1 spot on the CPC benchmarks leaderboard

Okay, so you already know that Intel’s new Core i7 architecture is the new Lewis Hamilton of processors, being fast, overclockable and more over-whelming than a night out with Brian Blessed, but not even we knew about its benchmark-breaking abilities until now. After plenty of tinkering in the CPC lab, our overclocking guru James Gorbold (aka Lizard) has just taken the number 1 spot on the Custom PC benchmarks leaderboard with an overclocked Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, and he didn’t even need water-cooling, let alone LN₂.

With a Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme RT air cooler in place on our Asus P6T Deluxe, we managed to overclock the 3.2GHz CPU all the way to 4.27GHz, using a QPI speed of 177MHz and a 24x multiplier, and a 1.575V vcore. The test system was also bolstered by 6GB of triple-channel Corsair Dominator TR3X6G1600C8D RAM running at 1.77GHz with a 1T command rate, which really helped the multi-tasking score.

It helps, of course, that we also had a super-fast disk system, and we currently have the only 32GB Intel Extreme SSD in the country, which had Windows XP installed on it. Meanwhile, we used an ACARD DDR2 RAM drive for the actual benchmarks. The result is a stunning overall score of 2,447, with the multi-threaded video-encoding portion of the benchmark getting an excellent score of 3,415. This was enough to inch in front of Benchtec’s Barron_Greenback with his overall score of 2,401 using a Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9650 overclocked to 5.35GHz using LN₂ cooling.

As James points out in his name on the leaderboard: ‘Core i7 doesn't need LN₂ to win,’ and with results such as this we can’t wait to see what the guys at Benchtec manage to achieve with a liquid nitrogen pot. In short, if you’re looking for the ultimate CPU, then an Intel Core i7 is currently the way to go, particularly when it’s overclocked.