


But an interesting element to all of this is the variability of getting a good overclock. There will always be outliers, both good and bad (I’ve had my fair share of bad). Personally a lot of the people I talk to in this industry are both technical and overclockers, or who people arrange processors for system integrators – when you go through a few hundred samples, you can get a feeling of how good/bad a processor family is without single-use anecdotal evidence. Some users disagreed with the numbers I put in here, because ultimately the quality of the silicon and the luck of the draw can dictate how good (or great) an overclocking processor is. I want to bring back a table from our past Broadwell review: Intel 24/7 Overclocking Expected Results in MHz But nonetheless, some users will be going and buying hardware today, and this is what we achieved. As with most launch day overclocking, there is probably an element of maturity needed in the firmware to get the best out of it. As a result we had a mixed amount of engineering samples as well as our retail review sample from Intel, as well as new motherboards that were still having their BIOSes fine-tuned to get the most performance. Over the course of our testing, we managed to secure separate processor samples at different times before the launch date. What to Expect – Will it beat my i7-2600K at 4.7 GHz? DDR4-3600 is 18 x 200 or some other combination). Despite the maximum memory ratio listed as 32 100 MHz, for the faster DRAM kits the difference is expected to be made up with base frequency adjustments (e.g. The image above is an early diagram of Skylake, but we believe the maximum ratios listed will be present on Z170. These can be monitored externally as well to ensure accuracy beyond that of software. This is helped by allowing 100/133 MHz dividers for memory frequency, rather than the previous 200/266, for a finer division in memory selection to increase high frequency/multi-module stability.Īs the transition from Haswell/Broadwell to Skylake removes the integrated voltage controller and puts said voltage control back on to the motherboard, the processor now accepts three main voltage inputs for the cores, the memory subsystem/controller and the integrated graphics. Skylake is still technically qualified at this speed, but Intel expects to see reports of memory nearer DDR4-4133 in due course. Some motherboard manufacturers have extra components on board to either boost that range to 650 MHz+, or add a finer BCLK adjustment system to allow for 0.0625 MHz steps instead.įor DRAM, the DDR4 base specification is at DDR4-2133 for regular JEDEC timings.
#Intel burn test gflops 6600k full#
What Skylake does is separate the clock domains altogether, so we get a full range of BCLK adjustments for the processor from 100 MHz to 200-300 MHz in 1 MHz increments. Previously, when the base frequency was adjusted (100 MHz to 120 MHz), this would push the PCIe frequency too far out of alignment resulting in a lack stability, so the decoupling ratios were there to realign the PCIe clock back to normal (so a ratio of 1.25 means a setting of 120 MHz on the CPU gave 120/125 = 96 MHz on the PCIe, which is more stable). What this means is that, potentially, the way of overclocking back in 2006 with a high base frequency and low multiplier might be back, giving extreme overclockers more of a challenge. On the high level, the biggest change is that Haswell's decoupling ratios between the processor and the PCIe/DMI are gone, and the PCIe/DMI domains now run through a separate external clock. The main method of adjusting the total frequency by raising the multiplier still stands, but Skylake does offer a few more options up for users to play with. Fundamentally, Skylake overclocking remains similar to Broadwell and other platforms as far back as Sandy Bridge wherein the final frequency (4000 MHz) is calculated by the product of the base frequency (BCLK, ~100 MHz) and the multiplier (40x). We covered the concept of overclocking recently in our Broadwell processor review, with the reasons why and how we test.
