Intel Core i7 5960X “Haswell-E” Processor Review

Overclocking

Overclocking with Haswell-E wasn’t something we were that hopeful about. Given that overclocking capability has declined from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge to Haswell, we expected to see a drop in maximum overclock with the Core i7 5960X compared to the Core i7 4960X. Indeed, we saw exactly that. Our Core i7 4960X managed 4.5GHz while the Core i7 5960X managed 4.2GHz. That’s not to say it can’t be pushed higher: with more than 1.3 volts you could probably push higher but we simply didn’t have the cooling required. We were able to get our system to post at 4.5GHz with 1.3 volts, see below, but 4.3/4.4/4.5GHz were not Prime95 stable meaning it did not allow us to complete our benchmark suite for the review.

Just for clarification here’s what we did in the BIOS: jumped the multiplier up to 42X with a 100 BCLK and jumped the voltage up to a manual 1.3 volts. Anything above 1.3 volts was pushing it on our H100i, we will be delving into more depth on overclocking in the future and with much better cooling but for now we’ve kept it simple so we can get all our benchmarks finished safely and under stable conditions.