Information Technology

The Cooler Master V10 was finally available and is finally mounted on my CPU. I could thus start my overclocking experiments. My first comparisons with my old notebook already revealed some nice performance gains with the Core i7-920’s default speed of 2.67 GHz. So let’s see where a little tuning would get us. I originally only wanted to go to 3.2 GHz in the first time, but this turned out to be no challenge at all for this air cooler!

The impressively massive appearance lived up to its promise: At 3.2 GHz the CPU was still idling at 34–40 °C and didn’t exceed 62 °C at full torture (using MPrime). Then I went on to 3.5 GHz (where I had to increase voltage from 1.2 V to 1.3 V), not exceeding 65 °C. This potential was crying for more. Finally, at 3.8 GHz I didn’t exceed 74 °C, and this is where I’ll stay for now, idling at 38–43 °C with silent 900 rpm. I could probably go to 4.0 GHz; my RAM can bear 1600 MHz, what is the BCLK (base clock)’s speed of 200 MHz ×8.

So, how does this compare to the default 2.67 GHz? I chose the same image processing tasks as before:

Task #1: Render 8 RAW images to PPM in parallel

2.6 GHz: 04.6 sec → 22× faster
3.2 GHz: (No difference measurable)
3.8 GHz: 03.6 sec → 28× faster

Task #2: Render 8 RAW images to JPEG in parallel

2.6 GHz: 18.2 sec → 16.5× faster
3.2 GHz: 16.0 sec → 18.8× faster
3.8 GHz: 13.7 sec → 21.9× faster

Now I should do some benchmarking of my GPU. What’s the most demanding 3D shooter under Linux?