Sandybridge clock generator question

[dorion]

QQ, Intel killed cheap overclocking.

Or could a resourceful motherboard maker put their own clock generator on their board?

It could work if the clock is driven by a pin on the chipset, but I can't find documents that would explain if the cpu is driven by a clock pin or if it does something funky like pulls the clock timing from the DMI link.

 

[slag]

err, what? What do you mean they killed cheap overclocking? $179.00 for a processor, 99 bucks for a board, a 3.3 @ 4.6 with just changing the multiplier. They made it simpler, they didn't kill it.

 

[pm]

The reference clock (refclk/bclk) is generated on the board at 100MHz, and is delivered to the CPU which uses the clock along with internal PLL's to generate the variety of internal clocks used by PCI-E, the graphics and CPU and memory clocks. You can adjust the board clock on most motherboards, but the PCI bus in particular is sensitive to clock adjustments and so you can't change the value very much without risking data corruption.

Anand's review discusses it here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/3

The pin for BCLK is described (briefly) in sections 6.7 and 7.3 of the specification:
http://download.intel.com/design/processor/datashts/324641.pdf


* not a spokesperson for Intel *

 

[MrHydes]

what do you mean dorion?