Overclocking the Core i7 870 CPU

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get. The Thermalright MUX-120 CPU cooler was used for overclocking as the retail boxed cooler wasn't up for the job as seen on the previous page.

Here is a CPU-Z v1.52.2 screen shot of the Intel Core i7 870 processor to see what we are going to be overclocking.  The processor has a base clock of 133MHz with a multiplier of 24 (in turbo mode); that is good for 3.2GHz. 

With everything left to default in the BIOS and by just raising the base clock to 168MHz the system booted up, and thanks to Turbo mode we were able to reach 4045MHz in a matter of seconds. The system was rock solid and the memory kit was running at an impressive 2022MHz with CL8 timings.  The ASUS P7P55D Deluxe motherboard was running BIOS 0701, which came out just yesterday on 9/7/2009 and it seems to be very stable and overclocking-friendly.

In order to reach higher we dropped the memory multiplier down by one level and pushed up the base clock to 180MHz, and sure enough the system booted and was rock solid. This is an overclock of more than 1.1GHz, which is impressive for just air cooling.  With a little more time with this board we should be able to reach 4.5GHz as this processor seems to have a little more left in it.  The Intel Core i5 750 processor also was able to get up to 4.0GHz, so Lynnfield processors are overclocking-friendly.