Windwithme got his hands on Intel’s latest CPU and spend several days checking out its performance and to see how far he could overclock it with an air cooled heatsink.

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The Core 2 Extreme X6800 has 4Mb L2 cache and comes clocked at 2.93Ghz. The FSB is 266 (quad-pumped) x 11 (multiplier) giving an effective 1066Mhz FSB.

Can you tell which one is which?


On the left side is the Core 2 on the right a Pentium D 950 C1

I used a MSI 975X Platinum 2.x (most important difference with version 1.x is support for Conroe CPU)



Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3 DDR2 800 CL3 4-3-9 (with support for nVidia’s EPP)



Motherboard BIOS Tweaking options

The Cell submenu allows you to control most important options



The FSB can be increased all the way up to 425, which would translate into 4675Mhz CPU clock speed with multi 11x; so there’s quite a bit of headroom.



CPU voltage up to 1.58v



DDR2 voltage up to 2.35v




Full system Setup

CPU:Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
Cooling: Thermaltake Tower112
MB: MSI 975X Platinum 2.X
DRAM: Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3
VGA:ELSA 6800Ultra
HD:Seagate 7200.7 80GB
POWER:AcBel 550W

Time to start the fun ->