About one year before I pushed a brand new 3 GHz North wood central processing unit up to 4 GHz utilizing few phase-change cooling. Unluckily, since then, not much has altered on the Intel side of town; sure there were the Extreme Editions which price an arm and a leg, and then there is the Prescott.

The 90nm Prescott was guessed to be an developed to the lasts North wood core, but many online have shown this to be hardly fact. But how do they overclock? I determined to order myself a P4 3.0E and see how far I could push it utilizing conventional air cooling and of course, a more very approach.

I picked up a second hand Abit IC7 Max, fresh/former GF4 Ti4200 and utilized my trusty OCZ PC4200 which ran exactly at 275+Mhz on my Asus PFourC800-E Deluxe.

So on with the depict; I slapped on an universal Thermal right heat sink which has did well in the last, the SLK-800U in combination with a no-name 80mm fan which gave me an excellent noise/cfm balance.

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As I was also impatient to sit by an entire Windows XP set up nor function this system at default velocities I began trying how long this little central processing unit would let me go early it stopped "POST-ing".

Yep, that is right, functioning at a toasty 73°C and I am only sitting idle in the BIOS here. How much of this 4.12 GHz overclock did I retain when trying in Windows? Turn the page to search out ->

At 1.68v vcore this central processing unit is inserting out a lot of heat and 3.9ghz is fairly much the maximum I could squeeze out of it; It is comparable to the lower end Prescott 2.4 which does not arrive

With HT but can acquire up to 3.6ghz; seeing as the 3.0E is not actually "low-end", getting up to 3900Mhz utilizing easy air cooling tells you something about the yield one can acquire from Intel's new silicon.

At 4.4ghz the system was not stable sufficient to do any serious benchmarking but dropping it return to 4.3Ghz permitted me to do few gaming sessions at insane velocities (as insane it can acquires with a Ti4200 of course).

While together of these central processing unit extended plenty of function when cooled through a Mach I, it were the air cooling tries which caught my eye, where the Northy 3.0GHz stopped at 3.6Ghz, I was functioning the fresh Prescott at velocities close to 4ghz, air-cooled! As long as you have sufficient cooling power in your system and the perfect CPU board, you too can reap the higher overclocking profits of Intel's latest.