Tech Reaction

It was almost exactly a month ago that I took the Classified and its 965 occupant over the 5GHz mark and under seven minutes in 32M SuperPi. Well today, I took the baby nephew of the 965 – an Intel Core i7 920 – well over 5GHz and even further below seven minutes in 32M Super Pi.

The trip started innocently enough with a locally purchased i7 920 sporting the date code 3845B026. Soon after some quick air testing, however, things took a turn towards the crazy track with the idea to test a theory on whether a colder north bridge would assist with BCLK clocking. It turns out it didn’t, but that won’t prevent me from showing the vacation photos.

I had simply planned on multiple layers of Armaflex insulation tape for the NB pot but ran into a problem when I realized my roll of Armaflex tape was still making it’s way back from the GOOC 09 event in California this past weekend…so I had to improvise.

After some cutting of 1/2″ Armacell sheets, I had a nice little north bridge pot insulation sandwich. Paired with the mounted MMouse Rev 3 CU pot, I had my twin towers ready to rock. After looking at the north bridge insulation sandwich for a while, it gave me the craving for a clubhouse, so it was a couple hours and a few pints later that the benching began.

Complete Hardware Setup:
• EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified
• Stock PWM cooling / DetroitAC NB Pot / Swiftech MC14 / Enzotech SLF-1
• Intel i7-920 3845B026
• MM Rev3 CU Pot w/LN2
• Arctic Silver Ceramique
• Corsair Dominator-GT 1866 7-8-7 (TR3X6G1866C7GTF)
• ATI PCI Mach64
• Scythe Ultra Kaze 120MM 2000RPM 87.6CFM (DFS123812L-2000)
• Seagate 7200.9 80GB SATA II 8MB cache
• Custom N’lightnd Windows XP Pro SP3
• Corsair HX1000W

As mentioned, the cold north bridge didn’t assist with BCLK at all, as I got the same clocks as previously with the north bridge running at a steady 70C during a previous session. This wasn’t much of a surprise to be honest. At the 250BCLK point, the Classified simply needs fine voltage adjustments to eek the most out of a processor. It was still fun running the NB at -40C, and it seemed to handle those temps no problem at all.

Enough fooling around though, time to look at the results. First up is the highest BCLK I have reached with this combination so far. As mentioned, more is definitely possible with proper time put in fine tuning secondary voltages…but 250+ for validation is still plenty impressive

After fooling around with voltages for a few minutes to maximize the BCLK without too much effort, I turned my attentions to Super Pi, both 1M and 32M. I only ran 1M a couple of times and did get 250BCLK to run a couple of times but had freezes opening CPU-Z. This has happened to me before with this motherboard and requires the CPU pot to warm up a bit. I didn’t have patience because I wanted to move on to 32M and didn’t have much time to spend benching. Here are the two best results I have pulled with this combo thus far.

The first i7 920 under 7 minutes in 32M and if I am not mistaken, under 8 seconds in 1M. At the time of posting, the 32M is actually 6th globally ranked amongst all CPU’s on HWBot.org and this 920 absolutely crushes the 965 C0/C1’s I have tested. With a little more work on voltages and better memory, there are sure to be quicker times from this combo.