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Overclocking the QX9770

The QX9770 is the second Penryn I've had the pleasure of overclocking, and it did not dissapoint me. This slightly newer Yorkfield stepping, and it is slightly sweeter than the QX9650 I last tortured. I only got 50MHz higher, but going from 4.25GHz to 4.30GHz is still a nice score, as this overclock is still strictly air cooled.

3.6GHz - it was boring, default voltages, bump fsb to 450MHz, and it was done.

4.30GHz - had to work for it:

• Vcore at 1.575V (Dangerous without really good cooling)
• Vdram at 1.8V
• Vmch at 1.4V
• Vfsb at 1.45V

I was also able to run a few tests at 450x9, but the system was not stable. If I had dared to raise the FSB voltage more, it might have stabilized, but I did not want to take a chance.

Even more impressively, I was also able to boot to the Windows desktop at 440x10 - yes, that's 4.4GHz - but sadly, it was unstable.

4.30GHz was rock solid though!

Power consumption

As you can see from the chart below, the system power consumption really goes up with the FSB - and it looks like the memory and chipset play a very significant part in how much power is drawn by the system as a whole!

Here's a chart comparing the power consumption at idle and at full load for the QX9650, QX9770 and X3210 at stock and overclocked settings

Basically, if you want to overclock like crazy, you need a GOOD power supply - and this was with a single 7800GT!

Conclusion

The QX9770 smokes.

Fortunately, not literally.

Intel did a great job keeping the power consumption of the processor under control - there is absolutely no doubt that the 45nm architecture is great for speed and power consumption. I feel a bit awkward giving awards to two consecutive Penryn processors, but I must - first the QX9650 blew away all our previous speed records, then the QX9770 went even further.

There is a downside.

There is little doubt that the QX9770 will not be cheap - on the other hand, its a no muss, no fuss, no brainer way of getting extremely high performance even without overclocking. I can hardly wait to see the results I'll get once I get some DDR3 sticks in here that will work at 2000MHz+ as I had to reduce memory speeds to around 1700MHz to get the maximum processor speed.