Gobe wrote:
Is that 4.8 GHz at less than 1.3 volts via a pre-binned CPU or did you get lucky with a winning silicon lottery ticket? I can get 4.5 rock stable at 1.25V but it takes around 1.35 to stabilize 4.6. So I run routine at 4.5. Stabilizing 4.7 was doable, but it took stupid extremes to pull it off.
Voltages are actually roughly:
4.6 1.275-1.280
4.7 1.30-1.32 (I didn't tune much, temps were uncomfortable for 24/7 100% load)
4.8 1.36-1.37
I put a premium on high cache and DDR as well since my intended use benefits greatly from them. So, all of the above are with a 4.4 cache at 1.27.
Not pre-binned - dumb luck and perhaps a little coin-toss probability. I have 2. The other tops out at 4.4 @1.290. In both cases, I haven't gone past 1.37, maybe there is more, but I'd need to do something more extreme than the EK mono-block and 420 rad. I am not doing ice or chilled water.
Gobe wrote:
The tight clustering of the top 5960X scores says that these numbers represent about all that this CPU can do. Seems that some of us get a scoring edge in one aspect and might lag in another. Some of it is the silicon lottery and some of it is know-how. There's also a bit of luck and the good graces of the overclocking gods to be had. I've been OCing on and off for the past 15 years (longer if you count fooling with old i486 CPUs in the mid 90s via motherboard jumper clusters and painfully sparse documentation) and I'm finding the Haswell-E in combination with the X99 motherboards to be the most fun and versatile platform yet.
Agreed, though it also speaks to how the benchmark is scored.
