Can you overclock i3 530

Clarkdale is somewhere in between. The Core i3 runs at 2. Without swapping coolers or feeding the chip any additional voltage, the most I got out of it was 3.

Hardly impressive. I added another 0. Part of the trick to overclocking this thing was lowering the clock multiplier. Despite always keeping the QPI and memory frequencies in spec, lowering the clock multiplier on the chip improved stability significantly and allowed me to reach much higher frequencies. I could push beyond 4GHz but that requires more voltage and potentially better cooling. With a stable 4GHz overclock, I was happy.

Unfortunately all our budget P55 boards have gone back to their respective manufacturers but instead we've been inundated with H55 boards. It's not all bad news for Gigabyte though, the H55M-UD2 works great with Core i3 so we've also featured this board and our OC settings over the next few pages. We've included a basic setup guide for newer overclockers, and then a BIOS guide for several motherboards before benchmarks of how much extra performance overclocking can get your versus other popular CPUs.

We rounded up a couple more H55 motherboards from Biostar and Gigabyte in order to test and show you the overclocking capacity with a Core i The questions remain then: what potential does an Intel Core i buy you? Click to enlarge. Want to comment? The QPI frequency doesn't make a huge amount of difference, so we set it to a nominal 3GHz, and we disabled the CPU power phase control too - power stability is much more important than saving a few watts.

Even with just the four power phases on the Biostar board, we still achieved an overclock of 4GHz. The Core i doesn't need much core voltage - in fact, see how far you can go without increasing the value, because the less voltage you use, the less heat the chip puts out. We found slight voltage increases can be just enough to tip the CPU core into stability, but always keep an eye on your temperatures as you push your system further and faster.

Click to enlarge. Want to comment?