Intel Core i7 5820K Review
Test Setup
Intel Core i7-5820K
ASUS Rampage V Extreme
nVidia GTX780Ti
Corsair LPX 2800 DDR4
Corsair AX760i
Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD
Corsair H105
Custom Corsair 540 Air
Windows 7 x64
Overclocking
With all of these more affordable Intel processors the ideal scenario is to manage to get it to equal the performance of the next one up, or perhaps even the top of the line one.
Overclocking the Core i7-5820K was a frustrating affair. We couldn’t get our 3000MHz G.Skill RAM to run at all, and the CPU itself didn’t seem to enjoy any BCLK speed above the standard 100MHz. Certainly, as you can see on the left, it was possible to run at higher speeds but that severely limited the amount of overclocking you could actually attain from the CPU itself.
Dropping back to 100MHz allowed us to climb much further, towards the 4.5GHz that we’re used to from the flagship i7-5960X, although at the cost of DDR4 performance. It’s very much a case of picking your poison, although CPU clock speed should always trump RAM speed.
