asus extreme tuning utility intel i7 6800

During our measurements by trial and error we found that at 1.3 Volts you will end up at roughly ~4.2 GHz. The 6950X has a base clock of 3.0 GHz and may boost to 3.5 GHz. Obviously overclocking 10-cores is a tough job. As I am about to show you even this cooler is not capable enough. So, as you can see we are using liquid cooling already, a Corsair 110i GT, which is a pretty good AIO cooler tbh. In our initial experiences we concluded that the CPU cannot take high voltages (which are required to reach higher frequencies). The results however remained 100% the same, it seems we have a very bad sample for overclocking, or high temperatures once you pass 4.2 GHz / 1.30 Volts is just the nature of 14 nm Broadwell-E. So after some confusion I simply swapped out the motherboard for an ASUS X99A-II (see photo above). The temps actually went up so fast that we doubted it was the processor and started doubting the motherboard or its BIOS. Initially when we started this review we used the MSI X99A XPower the temperature had been normal on that system, until we started overclocking. Your voltage should sit at maximum at roughly up-to 1.3 Volts with an AIO water-cooling, dual rad seriously recommended!

Overclocking with Broadwell-E is far more difficult than we expected it to be (at least once you pass a frequency threshold). Also get yourself a good power supply and proper processor cooling.

First tip, always invest in good hardware by the way (MOBO/PSU/Memory/Cooling), the cheaper motherboards often are not well tuned for enthusiast overclocking. We're keeping it relatively simple. We need to take a couple of steps if we want to overclock. With so much horsepower in the system we could not resist trying out overclocking. Tweet Overclocking - The Core i7-6950X On X99

Asus extreme tuning utility intel i7 6800