We’re beginning to see some reports from the pioneers on Northwood, most particularly at VR Zone, and even this early, we can draw a few conclusions:
Before beginning, if you go to the link, “LN2” stands for liquid nitrogen. Don’t look at those results and figure you’ll do the same with the stock Intel cooler, OK? 🙂
Getting a Northwood to 3GHz is like getting a Palomino to 2GHz We’re talking about serious overvolting (over 20%) and very good if not extreme cooling.
We’re talking minimum 1.85V to have a realistic chance with the things. Given that this is rather above what Intel says is the absolute max voltage, we have to
consider this dangerous to the life of the processor, and unless you are willing to lose expensive processors for the sport of it, DON’T DO IT. (We are wondering, though, why mobo makers followed AMD’s voltage
guidelines religiously, and are completely ignoring Intel’s).
To my knowledge, the only board at the moment that gives you 1.85V without the need for a voltage mod is the Gigabyte 8IRXP.
Intel is Binning I’ve been told by pretty reliable sources that the 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Northwoods are basically not quite good enough for 2GHz or better, and the overclocking results
I’ve seen so far tend to confirm that. For that matter, preliminary test seems to indicate that even the 2.0GHz are less capable overclockers than the 2.2GHzs.
I’ve seen no trace of 1.6GHz Northwoods. There are some 1.8GHz floating around here and there outside the U.S., and there’s a couple O/Cing results from those. The numbers do appear to be lower, but again, really, really early results.
We were supposed to be getting a 1.8GHz, but we haven’t seen it quite yet. If and when we do, I guess I’ll have to do evil things like this to it. 🙂
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