Now since we have such high-end cooling in the house we definitely should have better tweakability on the processor,

I was wondering where I'd end up with a quick overclock session. So we popped in a Core i7 870 processor for a good reason, we had a peek at a selection of stages in overclocking and it's respective temperatures, have a look at the following results please.

That is quite something really, let's break it down.

So as you can see, when we take this Core i7 processor up towards 4 GHz we see that the temperatures are not at all an issue -- whatsoever. With the processors stressed we max out at less than 60 Degrees C -- at 4 GHz and a CPU voltage of 1.4 Volts. We average out the temperatures of the four CPU cores btw.

Mind you that we measure at a room temperature of 21 degrees C, in hot countries the ambient temperature obviously will also have a (negative) effect on overall cooling performance.

But since we only push 59 Degrees C  .. my fingers got a little itchy, At this stage we where wondering if we'd be successful in overclocking the processor above 4 GHz, and so we did. We took it successfully and stable towards 4.3 GHz with 1.5 Volts pumped into the processor. The end result, with the processor cores stressed out 100%, is still stunning .. a temperature that is still hovering at acceptable levels at 70 Degrees C  at 68 C / 154F.