Intel Sandy Bridge will debute in the mid-range segment in January next year and not until the end of 2011 the LGA2011 platform and enthusiast model of Sandy Bridge will arrive. We now have confirmation that the overclocking limitations available in the mid-range segment will not be a problem for enthusiasts.

Beside promising performance and a powerful integrated graphics circuits there is a dark cloud for the enthusiasts when Intel presents its first Sandy Bridge platform early next year. Intel’s 6 series of chispet will ship with the clock generator for the processor bus integrated into the silicon. A clock generatorthat will also affect other units and buses around the system. As an effect of that you can’t raise the BCLK frequency for moving up the clock frequency of the CPU, because this will also affect other components like USB and PCI Express and quickly cause instability.

Intel’s solution is to unlock multipliers with some models – those marked with a K – that will be specifically for enthusiasts and wants to overclock, but even this does bring some light to LGA1155 for enthusiasts it nearly kills off the impact of the motherboard when overclocking, something we should not worry about when it comes to the enthusiast platform of Sandy Bridge.

During Q4 2011 Intel is expected to launch the LGA2011 platform. Dedicated for extreme enthusiaster and workstations there is support for octo-core Sandy Bridge processors without integrated graphics circuits. Instead Intel has chosen to integrated the BCLK generator into the processor and at the same time give users the possibility to, through dividers, separate the frequencies of the clock generator toward different parts of the system. In other words, overclocking with the Intel X68 chipset and enthusiast version of Sandy Bridge will work more or less just like the LGA1366 platform and Intel X58 chipset.

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Like LGA1366, LGA2011 is ready for extreme overclocking

With a year or more to go before the launch there are still plenty of details to be revealed about the LGA2011 platform. The processors are said to be developed under Sandy Bridge B or Sandy Bridge E, but the first CPUs are already out for testing at partners along with the Intel X68 chipset.

As expected Intel LGA2011 will be a lot more expensive than LGA1155 and we of course hope that Intel has something decent for overclockers in the mid-range segment too. In a few months we will know more.

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Richard Eckert

Really. I have an ECS board and they won’t talk to me and I can’t get a single bit of overclock.in fact it runs at 1.2GHZ tops. 3820 with X79R-AX and no one out there has a description on how to use this thing. 😥