Intel Core i7 2700k Flagship Showdown Review

Overclocking is a joy with the Z68 Sandy Bridge platform, especially on our Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z due to its UEFI BIOS which as you know, we can’t say enough good things about.

We found ourselves going straight in at 4.6GHz for our comparison tests and left all settings on auto and booted with ease and was 100% stable. Soon after, we started tinkering a bit further and found that adjusting the load-line calibration helped with keeping our voltages stable. We found a max overclock at 5.4/5.5GHz but this required high voltages of around 1.55V which for a 24/7 overclock, isn’t the best due to the sheer heat generated and how the life of the processor will be reduced dramatically.

We also found that it was only around 75% stable, once booted into Windows and in our eyes, that’s just not good enough. Instead, we decided to drop down slightly to 5.3GHz and found that 1.5V was the sweet spot, which is still a bit higher than we’d want to run 24/7 but as we’re running on a H80 Corsair watercooling kit, the temperatures were quite reasonable.

We were able to run the above overclock for a long period of time whilst stressing the processor using Prime95. Looking at the temperatures, they did start to run a bit high, but we believe that tinkering further with settings and voltages, we could possibly bring the VCore voltage down to give slightly better temperatures.