Overclocking
Overclocking was very easy with the ASRock board, the BIOS has an EZ OC utility where you just select the overclock setting you want and all the other relevant adjustments are made automatically. Another ASRock board I have uses this and I had to go back to raise the Vcore a little. On this board I actually lowered the Vcore as it was higher than I needed.
I ended up sticking with a 4.198gHz overclock which is 40.87% over the stock clock. That wasn’t even the max, I like to get comfortable with a processor before looking for the max overclock. This overclock was very stable and gave me no issues whatsoever. We’ll see in a minute how much of a performance boost I got from it.
Testing – Benchmarks
I ran the i7 860 through a series of benchmarks that test all performance aspects of the processor itself and the entire system. I ran all tests on the i7 860 at stock clock and at my overclock. I decided to also show results I received from an i7 920 LGA 1366 to see how much difference there is between systems built with the two processors. These systems are not otherwise equal, as the triple channel system was not currently available for new testing, and it was originally tested with a Radeon HD 4870, which is a much less powerful video card compared to the Radeon HD 5850.
Keep in mind that the i7 920, with its triple channel memory, should outperform the i7 860 in most tests. I’m looking for how close the newer processor gets.
*There was a problem running SuperPi Mod on the LGA 1156 rig. I don’t know what the issue was, it was like something was holding the program back. I ran it a dozen times and got scores ranging from 18 seconds to 42 seconds. Usually when running SuperPi the segments run smoothly, but here it would speed up and slow down. I did a complete clean install and ran SuperPi before installing everything, it still did the same thing. But I ran it on Safe Mode and it worked correctly. The scores on the i7 860 were run in Safe Mode.
**The 1x (single core) test on Cinebench10 seemed to have the same problems that SuperPi did. The Multi (all cores) ran superbly, with all eight threads running. Cinebench won’t run in Safe Mode. I was never able to figure out what was wrong.
