Intel 980x Gulftown
Test Setup and Overclocking
Published: 12th March 2010 | Source: Intel | Price: £850 - estimated |
Test Setup and Overclocking
Test Set Up
When testing a CPU like this the hardware has to do it justice so we pulled out the old faithful ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme, and after a quick flash to the latest BIOS she was ready for some 6 core abuse! At the same time its no good testing a 980X with a 3850, so the GPU of choice was a 5870, these have been tested many times on OC3D so we have many results to compare to see if the extra cores do indeed make a difference.
ASUS Rampage II Extreme
6GB Corsair Platinum @1333mhz
ATI 5870 1GB
OCZ 1000w Gold PSU
1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
Samsung 2433 24" @ 1920x1200
Windows 7 Ultimate 64
Overclocking
Before we get on to how this Gulftown 980 overclocks let's show you the default CPUz so you can compare.
First port of call here is the base clock, but its really quite a simple affair, you drop the multiplier down low and gradually increase the base clock to see what the maximum the CPU has to offer. At a 16x multiplier our CPU managed a 220 BLCK at stock 1.25v volts, surprisingly increasing the Vcore up to 1.325v and also increasing the QPI made no difference to what the CPU was willing to relinquish.
The next port of call was to try and find the CPU's maximum MHZ overclock, 4.4ghz (22x200) came about relatively quickly but with a little more tweaking and a 1.325vcore we managed to coax out 4.5ghz (180x25).
Overclocking is a great past time to see what you can achieve from your system, but to many its no good unless its as stable as it would have been at stock. Finding the sweet spot here is a timely affair and requires the patience of a saint, and plenty of free time...... Normally. After an hour of playing around with settings tweaking this and trying that we found the sweet spot on our CPU was 4.2ghz (210x22) with a Vcore of just 1.3v and the QPI set to 1.375v the chip was happily sat playing with Prime95 like they were the best of friends.
Not quite believing that 6 individual cores on 1 die were all running stable at 4.2GHZ I decided to leave prime running overnight. 14 hours later I came back and it was still happily running at 100% across all 6 cores and 12 threads, so I was happy enough to call it stable and started our benchmark testing.
Most Recent Comments
Blimey that's a bit of kit. Dear Santa
So wish I could afford to splurge on one of these, I wouldn't have to upgrade for tiiiiime.
Maybe with some ATI 5870's in crossfire, or Nvidia equivalents we could see 80 frames + from crysis
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Originally Posted by name='BloomerzUK'
OT: Love the avatar Tom.
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No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world.
Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department.
still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol
Great review btw.
Out of interest, did you manage to get a Super PI 1m at all? I just want to see some pwnage
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
Some serious power, I enjoyed the review tom. Cost is the problem here though, but this is always the case with bleeding edge hardware. Most of us have to wait for it to trickle down into our price range, which doesn't usually take long.
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Originally Posted by name='mayhem'
£850 est. come on guyes thats raly taking the piss.
No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world. Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department. still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol |
6x cpus are allowing those at the top end of benchmarking to exploit their donations at this point. We've already seen this week Shamino cream the 3dMark Vantage record by some 5000 points with a single 'retail' GTX480 in one run, but my argument would be that with a 4x cpu, or his 6x with a 5870, would it only be a few thousand.
It's going to take a long time, imo, for these Intel offerings to calm down on the pricing stake. Maybe it'll take a really good AMD 8x to do it, but as far as extreme top-end cpus go for pricing, I can remember my QX9650 being priced at less than half of this.
If ur thinking 980x will remain the top cpu for these sockets forever, then u can appreciate it being £1k - but I somehow doubt that with Intel sticking with this socket set for a good few years to come, that the 980x will be the top end for it's duration.
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