i7 920 overclocking

Since the current stepping (C0/C1) of the i7s seem to top out at ~4ghz (without extreme cooling) and the BCLK currently seems to top out at ~200mhz, the 920 with it's 20x multiplier (and low price) seems to be the i7 to get.

People seem to need varying amounts of voltage to push the 920s to 4ghz, so it'll be interesting to see how the non-ES chips do.

The Bit-Tech article below touches on the memory voltage issue, and claims that as long as voltage difference between the memory controller (Uncore) and the memory is less then 0.5v you are safe.

So far all the decent overclocks seem to be on the Asus P6T Dlx board (and the P6T Dlx has onboard SAS - anyone know how good the marvell SAS controllers are?).

Here's a list of the 200 x20 = 4ghz overclocks I've found:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/11/06/overclocking-intel-core-i7-920/1

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=206775
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207028

I have read that the Extreme Edition tops out around 5ghz with extreme cooling. I'm thinking the records will improve as time goes on, this is just the first week.

2.66 --> 4ghz is a good start for air cooling. I remember owning a P4 2.8c that would only do about 3.3ghz on air and that was not a first generation stepping.

For a first generation stepping I think this CPU is doing very well.