[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
As we all know, overclocking is becoming more and more popular for general users. Once it was just something enthusiasts did for bragging rights and to squeeze that extra performance out of their computer. Overclocking potential is almost a regular occurrence when it comes to the purchase of any gaming PC. It’s hard to tell if overclocking has become easier over the years, or if the general population is just more informed on how to do it. One thing is for sure though, any time a reviewer or enthusiast gets their hands on a new CPU one of the first things they think of is, I wonder what sort of clocks I can get out of it.
In my time with the 7870K, I was able to get it overclocked to just over 4700MHz or 4.7GHz depending how you like to format your data. This is a 0.85GHz increase over the 3.9GHz base clock which isn’t too bad. I normally like to get an extra 1GHz out of a CPU when overclocking, which doesn’t always happen, but I wasn’t that far away when overclocking the 7870K sample I received.
Now, maybe if I had a bit more time with it, I may have been able to get that full extra 1GHz out of it, but I am still happy. The main stepping stone was the 4.5GHz mark as this is what I ran the OC portion of the benchmarks on and this is what most consumers will instantly want to push theirs too. 4.5 GHz was easily obtained with nothing but a multiplier increase and a tiny voltage bump which is easily done through the BIOS of your preferred motherboard.
