14 DAY TRIAL // When Intel announced that it has decided to limit the overclocking potential of the CPUs built around the Sandy Bridge architecture, many computer enthusiasts feared that the chips wouldn't be able to reach any worthwhile OC results, but recent developments tend to disagree with this claim as the 6GHz barrier has just been smashed by a Core i7 2600K processor.
The result was achieved by a Japanese overclocker that goes by the name of Booooon and who paired Intel's chip with an Asus Maximus IV Extreme motherboard and 4GB of Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 memory.
Cooling was provided by liquid nitrogen and the core voltage of the Intel chip was raised to 1.68V.
In addition, to reach this frequency, the overclocker also has to raise the BCLK of the CPU from the standard 100MHz to 107.2MHz, an impressive feat considering that most of the Sandy Bridge processors don't like going more than 3% above the stock BCLK.
The final clock rate was 6003 MHz and Nordic Hardware reports that Booooon was even able to run PiFast at 5994MHz and ended up with the third best score in the world, just a few hundreds of a seconds higher than that of a Core i7 980X clocked at 6930MHz.
The Core i7 2600K is Intel's fastest desktop Sandy Bride CPU to date and its stock frequency is set at 3.4GHz (up to 3.8GHz in Turbo Boost mode).
However, unlike most other second-generation Core processors, the 2600K was designed with overclocking in mind as the chip comes with an “unlocked” multiplier (limited at 57x) that can partially make up for the lack of BCLK adjustment.
At the end of the year, Intel will launch a new series of LGA-2011 processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture that will target high-performance systems and will feature an unlocked base clock.
