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It looks like Intel's upcoming Core i7 7740X could be quite the overclocker according to reports this week. Intel's Kaby Lake-X Core i7 is heading our way fairly soon and while it may not be the most exciting chip in the lineup, a leaked reviewer's guide points towards 5.0GHz overclocks becoming less rare.
The folks over at Videocardz managed to get their hands on the guide and leaked parts of the overclocking section. According to the leak, Intel took 100 Core i7 7740X samples and tested their overclocking capabilities, with many hitting 5.0GHz at 1.205V. Some samples needed a little more convincing, with 1.341V being the worst case scenario voltage wise.
The best chips in the pile (23%) could go as high as 5.3GHz, though it required a lot of voltage. Meanwhile a good 53 percent of the test samples were able to hit 5.2GHz at 1.346V. These ‘middle-good' chips hit 5.0GHz with 1.215 volts. The worst overclocking chips in the bunch (24%) managed to hit a high of 5.1GHz but required 1.411V. A 5.0Ghz overclock on a poor OC chip took 1.341V.
Now these results were only based on a sample size of 100 chips, so we will get a broader range of results once the Core i7-7740X is officially available. At first glance though, overclocking potential seems fairly good, though the silicon lottery will play an important role. Keeping temperatures down will also be a concern, given that the Core-X series will continue to use TIM under the heatspreader.
KitGuru Says: Stay tuned for our review to get a look at our results with the Core i7-7740X. Are many of you planning on making the jump to X299? How important is overclocking potential to you when building a new rig?
The Core i7-7740X seems to be an odd duck to release right now. Not sure who this part is targeted at.
This whole X299/Kaby Lake-X Core debacle has been equally tragic and embarrassing, with half the tech review community almost ashamed to post reviews and the other half pretending that the reviews out there don’t exist. As a reader of many tech sites it’s pretty excruciating and Intel should be hung out to dry for its complete lack of respect and mistreatment to the very websites which have provided coverage and lined it’s pockets, when it had the market to itself.
We all get it Intel, Ryzen has rocked you to the core and Threadripper is not going to make things any easier for you but just because you’ve rushed out a half-baked, semi competitive processor and platform, that doesn’t entitle you to strong arm the websites we love and force them to ‘obtain’ processors through other channels. I hope long time Intel fans will at least objectively weigh up both processor manufacturers next time they upgrade and at the end of the day chose what’s right for you, but this just doesn’t sit right with me.
According to Intel, at those who already want to upgrade to the x299 chipset with the lga 2066 socket, but cant afford a 10-or-more-cores cpu right now. This is, of course, total bullshit, unless you’d be looking at upgrading one year from now. If you are planning this over a longer period it is a totally useless way to do it, since by 2020 we’ll have both DDR5 and PCIe gen 4.0, and thus we’ll need new high-end chipsets anyway. All in all, i doubt even Intel knows who to sell these chips to. If you need a new rig now because your old one is totally outdated, but want to go cheap now so you can invest in better later, get a ryzen 7 1700 (for both gaming and productivity) or Ryzen 5 1600x (for gaming) on a b350 motherboard, which together costs less than most x299 motherboards by themselves, and save up for 2020 😛