That’s right! FREE HARDWARE! Just for being a registered and active blogger of TechREACTION.net.

How do I sign up? Simple, first register at this page to become a TR blogger. Once you receive your account information, half the job is done.

Second, go to the TechREACTION forums and register there as well. You must be registered in both places to be eligible.

Bloggers are given special access to a private forum where they can discuss content and blogs, as well as be notified of available review samples and other perks.

What about the giveaway? It’s easy. All you have to do is be yourself; a technology enthusiast. To qualify you must follow these simple rules:

- One blog post equals one submission to the contest.
- Two blog posts equals two submissions, and so on, and so forth.
- In cases where there are multiple prizes, a single blogger will only be able to win one. Prizes are drawn at random.

I have never blogged before, what’s the deal? Don’t think of it as something only for the elite. Blogging is really no different from posting on a forum, such as this. The difference being that it’s more organized, looks more professional to the reader, and puts the information on the front page rather than just buried deep in some thread somewhere.

Many average Joe’s who simply starting out with some basic blogging are now writing doing full fledged reviews and making a solid name for themselves, and you can too.

I’m interested, but what can I blog about? Everything, as long as it’s technology related. Here are some examples:

Just did some benching with a few buddies or by yourself? Blog it.
Bought a new smart phone or mobile device that you can review? Blog it.
Testing out the new version of an operating system? Blog it.
Seeing what better cooling does for your CPU overclock? Blog it.

The list goes on and virtually anything can be blogged as long as it’s related to the main subject: Technology.

Giveaways occur once a month, so by registered for this months giveaway you are in fact registering for every giveaway from here on to infinity. Sounds easy enough no?

Previous Contest Prizes & Winners:

May Prize: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
Winning Blogger: Krab

April Prize: Thermalright Heatsink Pack (TRUE & 2xTRAD2 GTX’s)
Winning Blogger: Burn

March Prize: EVGA P55 Motherboard
Winning Blogger: carpo93

February Prize: Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Kit & OCZ Gladiator CPU Cooler
Winning Bloggers: 0Ro!, The Duke

December Prize: Corsair HX750W & Razer Lachesis Gaming Mouse
Winning Bloggers: The Duke, Archer

November Prize: Gigabyte P55-UD4P Core i5/i7 Motherboard
Winning Blogger: thebanik

October Prize: 2x AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
Winning Bloggers: mav2000, Neuromancer

Congratulations to you!

The winner of the May AMD Phenom II X6 Giveaway is…

Krab

Thank you for your participation and contribution to this community.  We hope you enjoy your new processor!

Thanks to AMD for sponsoring the giveaway.  Stay tuned tonight for the posting of this months giveaway!

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2010/06/01/winner-announced-may-amd-phenom-ii-x6-giveaway/feed/ 1 http://www.techreaction.net/2010/06/01/blog-mission-unlock-overclock-intel-core-i7-875k/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blog-mission-unlock-overclock-intel-core-i7-875k http://www.techreaction.net/2010/06/01/blog-mission-unlock-overclock-intel-core-i7-875k/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:22:40 +0000 parelem http://www.techreaction.net/?p=7161 Recently, I was handed a large case marked “Mission: Unlock // Overclock” along with an envelop marked “Top Secret.” Intrigued, I opened the envelop to find a series of smaller envelops labeled with phase numbers. Proceeding with the mission, I opened the phase 1 envelop. Inside the envelop I found a USB key, aptly shaped like a key, accompanied by instructions to plug it into a computer.

Upon plugging the key in, I was greeted by a series of statements to complete and the option to generate a passcode. After completing the statements, I generated a passcode, removed the key from the computer and opened the phase 2 envelop. Phase 2 required placing the key with the passcode into the USB slot on the large case, pressing a button on the case and hoping I generated the correct passcode.

Luckily, I did generate the correct passcode and the case was now unlocked. When I opened the case, I could not believe what was inside: an Intel Core i7-875k, an IntelDP55SB Extreme Series, and two 4Gb kits of Patriot Viper II Series, Sector 5 Edition PC3-19200 (2400Mhz)

That brings us to phase three of the mission, using this unlocked version of Intel’s ultimate smart performer, Core i7.

The setup:

i7-875k
8GB PC3-19200*
Intel DP55SB
EVGA GTX 260 c216 (600/1458/1000, core/sp/mem)*
160GB Western Digital Caviar SE *OCZ ModXstream 700w*
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ with two Cooler Master R4-C2R-20AC-GP in push/pull configuration.
Win7 Pro x64*

*For comparison, I used a Core i7 920 (2.66Ghz) on an EVGA 3x SLI (E758) board along with these components.

Although a vital part of any computer, the CPU heat sink was not included in the case. I opted for this setup for two reasons, the first being that I could run out to MicroCenter and pick up the Hyper 212+ and two extra high CFM, low DB fans for a total of $30, and the second being that the Hyper 212+ cools like a beast. Originally, I had planned on liquid cooling, but after I got an 1156 retention bracket for my block, my pump died so I stuck with this setup throughout my testing.

A video overview of the unlocking portion of the mission:

Before taking a look at the performance, let’s look at the features of the i7-875k. The i7-875k sports 4 physical cores, 8 logical via Intel Hyper-Threading @ 2.93Ghz, 3.60Ghz with Turbo Boost enabled and 8Mb Smart Cache. Intel Turbo Boost Technology, which can be controlled in BIOS, dynamically changes processor frequency when working under specified power and thermal limits in order to provide a smoother computing experience. Hyper-threading allows you to run a up to 8 threads simultaneously increasing your productivity and the integrated memory controller supports dual channel DDR3 memory. This gem sure packs a powerhouse in a tiny package.

The “K” in the model number indicates that the processor is unlocked. What this means is that the processor has unlocked Turbo Boost multipliers, allowing for quick and easy overclocking as well as unlocked voltage and memory frequency. Pairing an unlocked processor with the Intel DP55Sb motherboard allows for full control of your computing experience. The highly tunable BIOS let you easily take advantage of unlocked multipliers, and overclock like mad.

On to the stressing, benching and overclocking.

A series of tests were ran on both the i7 920 and 875k at both stock speeds and at 4.0Ghz for comparison purposes. All test suites were left on stock settings.

3DMark Vantage
A standard in benchmarking. PhysX was left on as both processors were being tested with the same GTX 260 at the same speeds.

The 875k outscores the 920 at stock speeds. While they have the same total score at 4.0Ghz, the 875k has a higher CPU score.

Maxon Cinebench R11.5
The newest release of the popular Cinebench benchmarking suite which simulates what results you can expect using Maxon’s Cinema 4D suite. Great for multi-core CPU testing.

The 875k out performs the 920 at stock, and performs nearly as well at 4.0Ghz.

Fritz Chess
Testing how fast the CPU can calculate chess moves using a real chess game engine. Fully supports multi-core processors.

The 875k beats out the 920 at both stock speeds and 4.0Ghz.

Hyper Pi
Another favorite amongst overclockers and benchmarkers. Calculates how quickly the CPU can calculate Pi the 1m digits.

Although faster at stock speeds, the 875k is slower to calculate at 4.0Ghz.

POV Ray
Free CPU based ray tracing software. It has a built in benchmark for painless testing.

875k takes the cake in both cases.

ScienceMark
A cluster of real world, rather than synthetic, tests. Composite score is compared.

At stock speeds, the 875k scores significantly higher than the 920. At 4.0Ghz, the 920 marginally beats the 875k.

SiSoft Sandra
Although Sandra has a slew of synthetic tests, only a handful of the CPU tests were ran.

At stock, the 875k scores better in all tests, but it’s a toss up at 4.0Ghz.

Folding@Home
Real world folding results, running -smp 7 (A3 units) on the native windows client.

Although points vary by work unit, the A3 units all produce approximately the same points per day, give or take a few hundred. The 875k is the clear winner at stock speeds, but the 4.0Ghz crown is up for grabs.

Games
Games were ran at 1920×1080, and game preset high settings.

World in Conflict

Battlefield Bad Company 2

Gaming is a toss up, both the 920 and the 875k perform very well. 875K better in WIC, 920 better in BFBC2.

The performance of the i7-875k chip is impressive; it scores close to, or better than, the i7 920 in most tests and a games, but consumes much less power with a TDP of 95w and a max of 89 amps drawn. Since this in an unlocked chip, both the TDP max amperage can be changed in BIOS that support it. To me, that makes the 875k a clear winner.

Now for what everyone wants to see, overclocking these new i7-875k chips.

Here are two CPU-Z screen shots at stock speeds and default BIOS settings. These chips have a base clock of 133Mhz and multipliers of 9-22, 24 in turbo mode:

To show how easy it is to overclock this chip, let’s start with a video.

Okay, that was pretty good, but I know this chip can do better. Now, there are four different turbo multipliers, each corresponds to how many cores are being used. So if you want to hit different speeds or save power while using 1, 2, 3 or 4 cores you can. For my testing, I set all four multipliers the same to ensure I hit the speed I was looking for.

One thing to note, memory frequency is linked and synced with BClk, so if you want a higher RAM frequency, you will need to use a higher BClk, not a higher multiplier.

On to the overclocking fun.

First I decided I was going to keep the multipliers at the default 24 and just increase the base clock frequency. Increasing BClk to 180 yields a core speed of 4.325Ghz at 1.376 volts, not too bad on air!

How about just increasing the UNLOCKED multipliers? Well, I cheated a little on this one. I wanted to hit at least 4.3Ghz, but I was having trouble high multipliers, so I had to increase BClk by 2Mhz. Bumping up the multipliers to 32 and the BClk to 135 yields a clock speed of 4.324 @ 1.408volts.

My favorite method, increasing both BClk and unlocked multipliers. Setting the BClk at 162 and multipliers at 26 yields just over 4.2Ghz at 1.32 volts. With such low voltage, there is more overclocking headroom.

Considering these results were all on air, I am very impressed by this chip. It is, by far, the easiest processor I have overclocked. The unlocked multipliers really give it an edge over locked chips; having the option of mixing increased multipliers and base clocks provides and overall easier overclocking experience. Also note, overclocking varies from hardware to hardware, person to person. My experiences are not guaranteed reproducible.

Now that I have unlocked and overclocked, my mission has come to an end I can honestly say I love this processor. As a folder, I have been fond of the i7 920 for quite sometime now, but with the unlocked multipliers and power settings, I have found a new processor for my folding rig.

One thing that has not been mentioned yet, because it’s impossible to measure, is the overall smoothness of computing. For awhile, I have been noticing my 920 is a bit more jittery than I would like. A little lagging that is probably not that noticeable to most has really been bothering me, especially after switching between the 875k and the 920. The i7-875k is smooth as butter, I have not experienced any of the choppiness I have noticed with my 920.

All in all, the i7-875k is a keeper. I had been looking for a reason to move to the 1156 platform and now I have found it and couldn’t be happier.

Here’s your chance to get on the overclocking fun!

Intel has been kind enough to provide a similar set of hardware to give away to one lucky reader. It should be obvious what makes the i7-875k so special, but if you are unsure what it is, I will give you a hint. I have scrambled one word that describes the specialty of the i7-875k, you will have to unscramble it yourself, but it is easy! Here it is:

ueokcnld

Once you have it unscrambled, head over to the contest section of the forums for more details.

Disclaimer: Intel provided the i7-875k, DP55SB and kits of Patriot memory to be used in this review. They have also covered the cost of promotion of and prize for the contest in which one reader will win a similar package.

Here’s the deal:  Sign up at the TechREACTION.net Forums and follow this guide on how to setup WCG/BOINC and begin crunching for TR.  Once you’ve got yourself setup, you can follow the team stats, as well as your own individual performance right here at the Free-DC Stats page.

Great, but how do you win the cash prize? Easy, once you’ve signed up, all you need to do is make sure that you are crunching everyday between August 1st and August 28th (my birthday btw).  This means that for every day between the 1st and the 28th, you cannot have any zero’s in the Free-DC stats or you will be disqualified from the contest.  The winner will be selected randomly from those who qualify at the end of the month.  Seems simple enough doesn’t it?  That’s because it is!

This could be the easiest $100 you ever made in your life, and on top of the prize, you’d sleep better than you ever had before just knowing that you had contributed to a great and worthy cause!

You need to make sure that you are ready to go and in full gear by August 1st to qualify, so that means that now is the time to sign up and start crunching so you have solid numbers come contest time.  Finally, just to re-cap, here are the steps you need to follow in order to start crunching for TechREACTION and win the $100 cash prize!

Step 1: Register @ the TechREACTION Forums.

Step 2: Follow the WCG/BOINC Easy Installation Guide.

Step 3: Track your stats at the TechREACTION Free-DC Team Stats page.

Step 4: Sit back and let the numbers roll in!

For any other questions regarding WCG, BOINC Setup or the contest for the cash prize, head on over to the TechREACTION WCG section in our forums.

Special thanks to 123Bob for sponsoring this contest!

The idea of a low clock challenge is to provide a playing field for benchmarkers to prove their tweaking skills in a given benchmark. Setting specific limitations constructs the playing field and opens the doors to a lot of people to compete that might not have the newest or best hardware that a wide open competition would require. Overclockaholics.com recently had a low clock 3Dmark 01 challenge which locked CPU clocks to 4.2GHz and limited Nature Frames Per Second to 1200FPS for single card or 1400FPS for dual card entries. These two simple limitations really setup an array of possible winning combinations that require tweaking skills at both the software and hardware level.

Needing a bit of a break from pounding my head against the wall with a memory review, I took a couple days to get back in the 3DMark 01 tweaking seat – which hasn’t been sat in for some time – and tried my hand at the Overclockaholics.com 3DMark 01 Low Clock Challenge. Here is my story of how I came to winning the single card category last weekend.

There are two primary platforms that can be competitive in this type of challenge, using an Intel C2D on the 775 platform or the slightly less potent Intel i7 socket 1366 platform. The reason i7 is actually a worse a platform for 3DMark 01 is the fact that the Nature benchmark scores are terrible on the i7 platform at 4.2GHz compared to C2D. You will soon find out that I had plans to take care of that. Essentially though, I had both platforms setup ready to rock but my goal was to be competitive with the i7 platform using whatever means necessary. I began preliminary testing on the Intel i7/X58 platform with phase cooling on the CPU. The need for sub-zero cooling on the CPU will also be explained shortly.

With the GPU on air, it was apparent that being competitive just wasn’t going to be possible. At a minimum, 90K was going to be required to win this thing, at this point in the weekend, I think the top score posted for single card was around 89.5K already. Even with the CPU under sub-zero conditions allowing for a very nice uncore clock – which helps 01 scores tremendously – the Nature FPS were just too low to compete. That is when the big guns were brought out to help the little GTX260 play with the C2D boys.

A little rubber eraser, 1 KingpinCooling.com Tek9 4.0 Slim, a 50K ohm variable resistor, a couple shop towels, and this setup was ready to rock 01’s world. The variable resistor was the only mod done to the card which was done to bypass OCP. Other than that, this is just a straight up Gigabyte GTX260 216SP video card. Here is a complete list of the hardware used for the rest of the competition.

Over the course of two six hour sessions, this system was beaten, abused, and downright throttled. The GTX260 nicely surprised me willing to run through Nature at -140C. Normally these GPU’s will cold bug well before that without a special BIOS so either these cards had that special BIOS, or this card is just a freak of nature. Either way, the GPU clocks definitely helped the score and took the single card results for the competition to the next level. Here are a couple photos of the two bench sessions.

Most of the benching was done with the GPU at -120C and the CPU at -30C ~ -35C. The digital multi-meter is showing the resistance across the OCP mod which I set to 13.33K Ω. This allowed GPU voltage of 1.25v to be used at clocks in excess of 1000MHz. For the suite of benchmarks, GPU clocks were set to 1026MHz with shaders running at 2052MHz. The GPU memory clocks were most stable at 1215MHz but could creep close to 1300MHz. For Nature however, the GPU clocks were set as they are in the screen shot below, 1080/2160/1215. Here is the screen shot of my best – and winning – single card result.

Obviously this isn’t even the best this setup could pull off at 4.2GHz because Nature is far from maxed out. If I could get GPU clocks high enough to hit the 1200FPS limit in Nature, the overall score would have been at least 92K. Either way it didn’t matter as this was enough to win the competition and take home a very much needed KingpinCooling.com F1 EE CPU pot. I have been benching with a MMouse Rev3 CU pot for so long that the upgrade to one with more mass is guaranteed to help with multi-threaded benchmarks like Vantage and 06 with the i7 processors. To wrap things up, here are a couple photos of the setup during tear down. Plenty of snow was produced during the bench session, nothing like winter in July.

I would like to thank Overclockaholics.com for a great contest, the rest of the competitors for pushing me to go LN2 on the GPU, and KingpinCooling.com for the prize. All I can say is that this card is far from done.