First Overclocked Sandy Bridge Systems Available

 The Trinity Plutonium is shown above with the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7 motherboard.



Intel's still-as-of-yet-unreleased "Sandy Bridge" chip has been generating a fair amount of buzz across internet discussion boards. Just visit Tom's Hardware, or Xtreme Systems and you won't have to look very far to see several topics on overclocking Sandy Bridge chips, or how to overclock a Sandy Bridge, or any number of discussions on how different it is to overclock the Sandy Bridge architecture.

Those who have done their fair share of overclocking via FSB/QPI acceleration and multiplier tweaking know that the best way to gain performance is to tune up your Frontside Bus (or QPI) as much as possible, and have the multiplier operate on that. The reason is that the Fronside Bus gains have a positive spillover effect to the subsystems attached to it (RAM for one), so throttling that puppy alleviates other potential bottlenecks elsewhere.

It was a big surprise to some of us to learn that the new Sandy Bridge architecture went in roughly the exact opposite direction! The FSB has slowed down to 100 MHz to allow for Intel's new design strategy of having "multiple multipliers" to deliver the functional speed of the associated subsytem. For their stock 3.4 GHz, the multiplier is set to 34. We've seen announcements that the new cooler operation (thermodynamically speaking) of the Sandy Bridge allows for reaching 4.9 GHz on air-cooling alone. Think of what a finely-tuned water-cooled or vapor phase change unit could deliver.

Screech. Hold on a second. What about that Intel Press Release about not getting the speed too much faster than that? Intel is claiming the "old school" thinking about "colder = faster" does not scale linearly with this new architecture. Hitting 4.9 GHz on air does not mean 5.5 GHz on chilled water is going to happen, which is a perfectly normal consideration on the pre-Sandy Bridge product lines.

Googling around, you see a common sentiment. All of the 4.9 GHz hype seems to be for short-run computations. In fact, there are only two active players in the market right now who are making any kind of remarks about long-term overclocking stability when applied to the Sandy Bridge.

Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking and GIGABYTE are the two companies who seemed to have outfoxed the rest of the industry gathering around the Sandy Bridge. Of course GIGABYTE released an entire series of motherboards to work with the Intel Sandy Bridge chips. Take a look at this expansive product launch from GIGABYTE:

The GIGABYTE 6 Series P67A-UD7 was the flagship choice for Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking when they built their Trinity Plutonium product line. Using this amazing GIGABYTE motherboard, they throttled their Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K chip up to 4.5 GHz for 24x7 computation at full load across all 4 cores/8 threads. That's right, no "caveats", no stipulations for using that clock speed for short periods of time --- if you want to beat on your system and run 24 hour torture tests for days, weeks, or months, Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking said "fine by us." This shows that Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking has incredible confidence in the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7, offering an 18-month warranty for all parts and labor on the Trinity Plutonium product line.

But how fast in an overclocked Sandy Bridge i7-2600K when compared to, say, the Intel Gulftown? According to Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking, 1.0 GHz of i7-2600K works out to 1.1 GHz of Gulftown for non-floating point benchmarking trials, and floating point is even better than this due to the architecture improvements in the Sandy Bridge. This would indicate that the overclocked Sandy Bridge i7-2600K @ 4.5 GHz on Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking's Trinity Plutonium model would be about the same performance as a 4.95 GHz Intel Gulftown, and we all know how fast the Gulftown is!

Wow! That's incredible performance, considering you can run that 24x7 while stressing all cores and threads to the max.

GIGABYTE also offers the following in the 6 series motherboard lineup:

The H67A-UD3H, H67M-D2, H67MA-D2H, H67MA-UD2H, P67A-UD3, P67A-UD3P, P67A-UD3R, P67A-UD4, P67A-UD5, (we already mentioned the P67A-UD7), the PH67-UD3 and the PH67A-UD3.

In building their Trinity Stealth model, a smaller version of the Plutonium, Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking selected GIGABYTE's  H67MA-UDH2 motherboard and the Intel i5-2500K chip. Overclocking this chip to 4.2 GHz for 24x7 operation was in line with their pricing strategy, to offer a low-cost 4.2 GHz system to a wider audience. It's amazing that you can get a 4.2 GHz system that delivers the same speed as a 4.6 GHz Intel Gulftown for less money than a fully-stocked 3.33 GHz machine.

We expect Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking and GIGABYTE will do well with their new strategy.