Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge CPU Review - PAGE 4

Since the 3770K is part of the "K" series of processors, it comes with an unlocked multiplier and like Sandy Bridge, changes to the bclock affect other buses aside from just the CPU clock speed. This means the majority of the overclocking will be done via the multiplier, and the bclock will only be needed for fine tuning the final clock speed. This is actually the preferred method for most overclockers, as there is no longer a need to by the best motherboard for overclocking since the bclock has been taken out of the equation.

To test the Intel Core i7 3770K, we used a Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink with dual high performance fans. With this setup we were able to boost the clock speed of the 3770K up to 4.8GHz, at 1.36V. At this speed the processor is running each core 37% higher than the base clock, and 23% higher than the Boost clock. We also could have scaled the processor higher, but we were already hitting temperatures of nearly 78°C, so we decided not to push it any further. However, if we were using better cooling it would not have been surprising to see this chip easily scale to 5GHz.

We did also play around with the bclock while overclocking to see if there was any improvement from Sandy Bridge. In all honesty, there really wasn't as the system didn't like it when we pushed the core clock above 4.8GHz using the bclock. The end result was that the system became unstable, and even while we could boot into Windows and run some of the less stringent benchmarks, programs such as OCCT, Cinebench and others would crash when the bclock was increased.

Intel Core i7-3770K Settings:

• Baseclock : 100MHz
• Clock multiplier : 48x
• Processor clock : 4800 MHz
• Memory clock : 2133 MHz
• Processor voltage : 1.36V
• CPU Voltage Type: Low V-Droop
• Turbo: Enabled