The guys over at HardwareZone published a review on the new Core i7 Extreme 975 3.33GHz that we’ve wrote about plenty of times already. If you’re one of those enthusiasts who has been dying to know what the overclocking potential of the new D0 stepping chip is compared to your current C0 stepping Core i7 965, it’s best not to even worry about it.

Using the basic methodology of simply increasing the multiplier and voltage in order to find the maximum capable on the Core i7 Extreme 975, the guys have found that the new D0 chip appears to have a slight improvement at best.

“Our older Core i7-965 XE managed to reach 3.86GHz in these conditions (reference Intel heatsink), one multiplier step below the 3.95GHz on the i7-975. While we subsequently broke the 4GHz barrier (4.08GHz with Turbo Boost) and got into Windows, the system could not complete all our benchmarks and we had to revert to the previous overclock.”



For the average overclocker not running LN2, phase, or any other exotic cooling solution, the performance improvement over the Core i7 Extreme 965 will be minimal at best. We will assume it is because slightly lower voltages can be used with the new D0 stepping. Other than that, the only difference is a couple errata fixes that can be seen here.

HardwareZone’s full review on the Core i7 Extreme 975 can be found here.