Sandy Bridge, the Complete Overclocking Guide

Closing Remarks

We have now arrived at the end of our article. Overclocking a Sandy Bridge processor is fun and relatively easy, but we would like to add that the quality of your Sandy Bridge processor has a major role in determining the final overclocking results. Sometimes you get a CPU that overclocks well to 5 GHz and beyond. In other circumstances, you may have to settle with, say, 4.6 GHz. It all depends on the CPU. According to our experience overclocking a couple of Core i7-2600K CPUs, some of these processors would reach their limit at 4.8 – 4.9Ghz.

The voltage settings as described in this article can be categorized as “moderate”, so as to prevent damaging the CPU. That, however, does not necessarily mean that your Sandy Bridge cannot handle higher levels of voltage. If you are the kind of person who really likes to push your CPU to its absolute limit, , you can try increasing the voltages even further, but do this at your own risk!

Below is the frequency limit of our Core i7-2600K CPU. The processor reached an impressive 5453Mhz and it could still finish a popular single-threaded benchmark: the SuperPi 32M. Some pictures of the BIOS settings we used to reach that speed are also included.

** Disclaimer : The 5.4 GHz clockspeed was obtained using an Engineering Sample BIOS from MSI. Your actual result may vary because of this**

See you in our next article, Ciao!