First K-series Sandy Bridge gets overclocked

Hits a respectable 5GHz

INTEL’S UPCOMING LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge processors have already been criticized for being bad overclockers, but judging by some screenshots (over at a Taiwanese forum) the K-series of unlocked processors does hold some promise. The bad news is that in this early attempt, the bus speed hasn’t been pushed a single MHz.

As the K-series of processors from Intel have an unlocked multiplier, we’re taken back to the early days of overclocking before processors had a multiplier lock. This was a feature implemented to prevent fraudulent sale of overclocked processors, or at least that’s how the story goes. Intel brought this feature back with its K-series of processors, and this will potentially be a lifeline to overclockers using the LGA-1155 platform.

With regards to the screen shots posted over at the Coolaler forums, well, a poster by the name of JCornell has provided a few screenshots of an early Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K which has a stock clock speed of 3.4GHz with a BClk of 100MHz. To give us an idea of the stock performance, screenshots were posted of it running SuperPI 1M in 10.031 seconds, and the CPU also scored 6.35 in Cinebench 11.5. These are pretty impressive numbers on their own, but it gets much better.

Sadly the poster didn’t provide Cinebench figures for the CPU at 5GHz with the CPU still at a 100MHz BClk, but with it running at a crazy 50x multiplier. It might only be an extra 16 steps up from the stock multiplier, but this helped to improve the SuperPI 1M score by a massive amount bringing it down at 7.488 seconds. It seems like these new processors can go all the way up to 65x multiplier, although it’s unlikely that we’ll see someone hitting 6.5GHz anytime soon. Oh, and this was all done using an air cooler and at below 1.4V which in itself is a pretty mean feat.

The question still remains as to whether or not it’s possible to push the BClk on the LGA-1155 platform, something that’s not really expected to be possible. We’re still about two months and a week or two away from the launch, but hopefully we’ll have had the BClk issue clarified by then, be it by Intel, the motherboard manufacturers, or an overzealous overclocker. Still, there are some question marks about Intel’s new platform, especially with regards to how long this yet again “new” socket will last. There are quite a few unhappy LGA-1156 owners out there that feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick with Intel’s move to a new CPU socket so quickly.S|A

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