Core 2 Duo: Going Strong at 3.60 GHz (Cont’d)

It’s plainly obvious that the G0 stepping will quickly become the new darling of the overclocking community, as it easily shreds the previous overclocking records set by the former champion, the B2-stepping.

If you’re hoping to run your processor at 3.60 GHz, you’ll need at least DDR2-900 memory, regardless of whether you’re using an i965 or a P35 chipset. Since the P35 has an additional memory divider of 2.4, which the i965 lacks, it also offers additional memory speed options in the BIOS.

This table lists the available memory speeds for an i965 and a P35 motherboard with an FSB of 333 MHz and 450 MHz, respectively.

A 975X board, which must have Core 2 Duo support, basically mirrors the options of the i965 chipset.

Taking our OC’ing experiments to the limit, we were even able to reach 3.70 GHz with our Core 2 Duo E6750 and boot into Windows without crashing. However, we could not make the system sufficiently stable to run all of our benchmarks without crashing, despite raising the core voltage to 1.4 Volts.

Mirroring our experience with the quad-core version our dual-core G0 processors booted up at 4 GHz, but failed to make it all the way into Windows. Since the dual-core processor proved just as overclocking-friendly as the quad version, chances are equally good that we may soon see a 65nm Conroe model running at 3.66 GHz released by Intel. Of course, this is just based on our observations and the clock speeds we were able to reach by overclocking. Who knows what else Intel still has in stock…

At any rate, reaching the 4GHz mark means running the FSB at 500 MHz, requiring at least DDR2-1000 memory in turn.

In our benchmark suite, the overclocked Core 2 Duo E6750 received a performance boost of about 30.6%.