Overclocking post-Nehalem

The X58 North Bridge doesn't have a heat spreader any more either - a simple decent aluminum heat sink with a medium rpm fan would suffice completely here. However, you do see the vendors overbuilding the heat sinks regardless. If Asus' Rampage Extreme large sinks and heat pipes weren't enough, Gigabyte goes another step too far by offering water cooling connectors for a chipset that, again, might not need to be overclocked at all.

Even the I/O requires no further tune-ups. the PCI-E v2 dual x16 plus one x4 connector should take care of even combined twin dual GPU plus hardware SAS RAID cards if you wish - the base bandwidth provided is sufficient without any need to push things up, including the upcoming GT300 and HD5870 card families next year.

The only problem is that, when they need to reach system memory, those GPUs will not have to go through one more 'hop': PCI-E first, then QPI to the CPU to get to the RAM. Same 'issue' was already seen on the AMD systems for a while, hopping over HT and PCI-E as well.

On the other hand, yes you better give the very best cooling you can for that CPU as pretty much everything else including your memory paths depends on that single hot spot. For an enthusiast wanting to go above 4GHz reliably for everyday operation, we'd strongly recommend a compressor-based fridge like Thermaltake Xpressar or a true freezer, the type of Asetek Vapochill LS. The side benefit of supercooled CPUs usually being able to reach a certain GHz at somewhat lower voltage, i.e. higher reliability, than the air or plain water-cooled processors, does help as well.

Expect to see far more complicated BIOS setup tuning options as the Nehalem generation matures and the myriad interdependent links on the voltage, clock, latency and bandwidth parameters for the CPUs, caches, memory controllers and QPI links emerge - not all of these seem to be in the initial BIOSes yet.

Luckily, the usual Trd limit of the chipset latency will be gone this time. We do expect, though, that the minimum latency on Nehalems (or Deneb for that matter) will be experienced when the CPU and memory controller clocks are in sync, even if it means slightly lower mem con frequency.

In summary - before we go into details next week - it seems an overclocked enthusiast Nehalem system would focus more on the CPU itself, its cooling and power delivery on the mobo, while the memory and chipset cooling would by right be simplified. There's simply not that much need for it for the DIMMs as they'll run pretty close to the stock voltage.

As for the chipset, it's a non requirement unless the unlucky mobo designer had to fit an NF200 PCI bridge for that TriSLI offering.

Now that's something that should be obsolete by the time this Christmas' bells start ringing.