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- Date:
- Tuesday , August 25, 2009
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Core i5-750 Overclocking Preview
Our first preview of our Intel Core i5 processor that we purchased online last week. We put the 2.66GHz Core i5 model 750 through some overclocking paces to show you what can be achieved easily with an enthusiast air cooler.
i5 Manual OCing Results
Our manual Intel Core i5-750 overclocking results were achieved using the hardware described on the previous pages. All of our results here were proven successful with Thermalright TRUE air cooling only along with MSI's P55-GD-80 motherboard.
We did however take two different overclocking paths as described below.
i5 "Safe" OC Results
With our first set of results we stayed inside recommended guidelines inside the MSI GD-80 BIOS. Meaning that if we bumped up to a voltage that was showing to be "red," we moved the value back down till it showed to be safe.
Stability at 4GHz was somewhat of mixed bag. We could run most of our benchmarks without issue at 4GHz with the i5, but if we tried to stability test the CPU we would always crash one thread running on a single core. At 4GHz, we had no issues running at 75% load across our cores though for hours. Keep in mind that our air cooling is not mounted properly since we do not have the proper LGA 1156 mounting brackets.
i5 "Not Safe" OC Results
With this second set of results we are using voltage values in the MD-80 BIOS that show up in red text on your screen. These values are to be considered "at your own risk" settings.
Stability here was even worse. We could easily run single threaded applications, but when the processor became loaded on more cores, we would see application crashes, but no OS crashes using Windows 7 64-bit. Again though, keep in mind that we are far from properly air cooling.
i5 "Really Not Safe" OC Results
Finally we wanted to show you what our 1.5v vCore held for us, but we had a hard time getting a screenshot so we had to revert to the camera, so please excuse our poor photography.
Stability at 4.4GHz proved to be so bad that we could not even get a screenshot in without a BSOD.
The Bottom Line
I am very much impressed with our first overclocking experience with a retail version of Intel’s Core i5-750. Keep in mind that we wanted to show you air cooled results here but did not have the proper mounting brackets for our Thermalright TRUE cooler. This lack of pressure on our mating surfaces surely could have impacted our results. I do however have no problem suggesting that with a little BIOS tweaking and maturation, and good cooling, that many of you will be seeing fully 100% load stability at 4.2GHz and possibly even 4.4GHz on air with the Intel Core i5-750.
Update: Make sure to check out HardOCP's Core i5 Performance Preview