Posted on Friday, August 18 2006 @ 3:04 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel's quad-core processor will arrive in the fourth quarter of this year but some members of the XtremeSystems forum already got their hands on a sample and overclocked it to 4.8GHz.
The processor did need just under 1.9V of juice along with a healthy supply of liquid nitrogen to get to that speed, and it stayed within a fairly chilly range of -170°C to -180°C (-274°F to -292°F.)
Stoolman's overclock was stable enough to run some benchmarks, including Cinebench 2003, which produced a single-threaded score of 556 and a multithreaded score of 2034. That's higher than what we obtained with our dual-3.0GHz "Woodcrest" Xeon workstation, although not as impressive as one might expect from a 4.8GHz quad-core chip. In 3DMark 2006, Stoolman's system hit 11,821 3DMarks with the help of a GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card. Liquid nitrogen does skew the odds a little, so we'll have to see how Kentsfield overclocks with good old-fashioned air cooling.
More info over
here.
