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Overclocking

The Xeon X3210 is the best Core 2 Quad for overclocking that I've had the pleasure to work with to date; no doubt largely due to the G0 stepping used for its dies. The maximum stable processor speed we reached during testing was 3.52GHz – for four cores with air cooling!

In order to reach 3.52GHz, we took the following simple steps:

• used the excellent Noctua NH-U 12 CPU cooler with two 12cm fans in a push-pull configuration
• used Corsair PC2-8888 DDR2 modules at 1056MHz with 4-4-4-12/2T timings
• set the FSB to 440MHz x 8
• set Vcore to 1.41875V
• set Vram to 2.4V
• set V MCH to +0.1V
• set V FSB to +0.1V

I was very pleased to see the chip run through all of our test suite with 100% stability at this clock speed.

I was able to get into Windows at up to 3.64GHz, however the system was not 100% stable, so I will only claim the stable 3.52GHz overclock.

Power Consumption

The stock power consumption is quite good; only 101W drawn by the whole system (excluding monitor) when idling at the Windows desktop; rising to 145W under maximum load.

When overclocked, the power consumption increases greatly - 116W when idling at 3.52GHz, and a whopping 207W under maximum load at 3.52GHz!

By comparison, at stock the E6750 drew 100W at idle and 132W when loaded, and when overclocked to 3.8GHz it drew 107W idling and 157W at full load.

Conclusion

We'd like to thank NCIX.com for helping us get a Xeon X3210 for this review.

When I reviewed the Core 2 Duo E6750, I was blown away by its air cooled overclocking potential. Ever since then, I have been looking forward to reviewing a Core 2 Quad processor based on the same G0 stepping die - and when the opportunity presented itself for us to get a Xeon X3210 based on that core in, I jumped on it.

I was not dissapointed.

I don't know about you, but to me, a 65.25% overclock of a quad core processor - and only air cooled at that - is very impressive. Granted, in a couple of the benchmarks the QX6700 running at 3.45GHz beat the X3210 running at 3.52GHz - but only because of the superior memory controller in the 975X chipset used for the QX6700 review.

If you do a lot of rendering of 3D images, or MPEG conversions then you currently cannot get a faster processor than a Core 2 based Intel quad core processor. For such highly multi-threaded software, the X3210 will trounce any dual core processor.

Gamers currently would still be slightly better off with a highly overclocked dual core processor as most games don't even take advantage of two cores, never mind four - however as time goes by, and highly multi-threaded games become prevelant, quad core processors will start to trounce dual core processors... and besides which... even running at a "conservative" 3.2GHz overclock at stock Vcore settings will get you more gaming goodness than ANY stock processor can offer!