Overclocking is really an electronic art form that takes years of experience to get the right feel for what a motherboard can do, and every new board has its own quirks and parameters to play within. We took the new Intel Core2 Dou E7200 and the E8500 on a little trip down overclock lane to see just how far these CPUs could be pushed on the new EVGA 750i FTW Edition.
Usually if a motherboard can attain a 15% increase this is decent overclocking headroom, but when a board can achieve an over 20% overclock this is a much more desirable for the end user. In this round of tests we used only a marginally high-end air cooler on an open test bed to cool off the CPUs and our results were simply awesome for overclocking in this environment. Just imagine what a decent liquid cooling system could achieve combined with the right CPU and memory.
We used some pretty fast Corsair PC8500 in these tests as well, and even though not the fastest memory in the planet it does very well in many overclocking instances and has found its own in many enthusiasts PCs. The new Intel E7200 was able to achieve a 3.56GHz speed over its normal 2.56GHz default setting, and the E8500 was able to go from 2.53 all the way up to a 4.2GHz increase completely stable. This is excellent results and shows the EVGA nForce 750i FTW to be a very overclocker friendly motherboard. The headroom on the FTW is out the roof folks!
