Core I7 Goes 5GHz

The recent few days have been filled with reviews and test results on the upcoming Intel Core i7 processors. The new 45nm CPUs have been expected to arrive for quite some time now, as the chipmaker spread the word on the great capabilities of its architecture, code-named Nehalem. As the company promised, the chips are able to deliver unprecedented levels of performance.

Some photos published on inpai show an overclocking test run on Core i7. The speed of this Bloomfield processor has been boosted up to 5GHz, as displayed by the CPU-Z utility. As seen in the images, the overclocked chip is an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition, which features a stock core speed of 3.2GHz. Previous speed boosting tests showed the CPU going easily to 4GHz, yet none tried to get it over this frequency.

The system on which the Core i7 reached 5GHz included an ASUS P6T DELUXE motherboard, 6GB of DDR3 memory and an ASUS X1650 series video card. Unfortunately, inpai does not specify much on test conditions, so we do not know what they used for cooling the chip, but it is highly unlikely to be air.

The overclocking capacity of the new chip is one of its greatest features. We've already reported a few facts on how the speed of the Core i7 processors could be boosted and to which levels. Today, we have a little surprise learning the new limit to which the chip can be pushed, a surprise driven mainly because the CPUs were reported at a certain moment to come with some limitations in the area.

The fact that the chip can do better is only good news for Intel, as the processors will probably highly appeal to enthusiasts and gamers. As the company stated a few times in the past, it included a great deal of new technologies in its Nehalem chips so as to make them reach unattained performance levels. And they are already reported to outpace most of the current CPUs on the market. We'll soon detail more on the architecture and capabilities of the new Intel Core i7 CPUs.