Published in PC Hardware

Limited memory overclocking for Core i7

by on06 November 2008

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Not enough memory dividers

It's come to our attention that apart from the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition, the Core i7 processors might have very limited memory overclocking potential. This has nothing to do with the earlier memory Voltage issue, but something completely different.

It seems as if the Core i7 920 and 940 only have two memory dividers (six and eight), while the 965 has five. This could cause some potential issues for those that want to overclock their memory, although in all fairness, so far this seems to have a fairly small overall impact on the overall system performance.

We're not sure why Intel has done it this way, especially after telling us at IDF that all the Core i7 processors have unlocked memory dividers. Due to the way things are, it seems like the 920 and 940 models are limited to running the memory at 1,600MHz at the most, that is if you overclock the Bclock.

The processors we've gotten these figures from are engineering samples, and at this moment in time we don't know if the retail processors will be different. Hopefully, Intel changed this for the retail models, but we'll have to wait a little bit longer to find out if this is the case or not.
Last modified on 07 November 2008
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