Why an Overclockable Core i3 Might Not Exist: The Supermicro C7H170-M and Intel Core i3-6100TE Review
by Ian Cutress on March 17, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Motherboards
- Core i3
- Supermicro
- Overclocking
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Y23KC - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Ah, the fun of overclocking. I used to overclock starting with an AMD Duron 800mhz to 1ghz. Stayed with multiple AMD processors (Thunderbird 1ghz to 1.4ghz, TBird 1.4 to 1.8, 1900+ XP to a real 1.9, etc.) Tried a few coppermine pentiums, but was disappointed. Then I went to the P4 Northwood processors. Favorite of those was a 2.53ghz to 3.06ghz overclock. Also had the 2ghz Celron that was a great overclocker to encode videos. Didn't move past them for a while since AGP switched to PCIE graphics card and ddr2 ram with the Core2Duo. Finally moved to Core2Quad 9400 and it was a dud overclocker. Got rid of it and moved to Mac computers. Kept a few Windows laptops and a HTPC but just recently went back to overclocking with a 4770k. It was also a dud overclocker. Recently I got a 5820k and overclocked to 4.5ghz. Been enjoying the tinkering but honestly beyond benchmarks and video encoding, I can't tell the difference between it and an i3-6100 that I currently use in my HTPC. I also like to tinker with the Hackintosh stuff these days, but Apple keeps screwing around with the imessage protocol that doesn't make it as fun anymore to meBulat Ziganshin - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link
i wonder who can buy your argument about "half-way to i5". 65W parts like the http://ark.intel.com/products/90731/Intel-Core-i3-... has the same perfromance level out of box