Sunday, July 7, 2013

Overclocking the Hack

By now I am building Hackintosh setups for years. In the past, I was sticking to what the average user would be doing, happy to see my hackintosh doing what I want it to do.

With my present "production" hackintosh, yes, I do own the licenses, i.e. bought the DVD, thing are different. This particular build (i5-3570k) opens the possibility to overclock... and this is exactly what I am describing in this post.

The Hackintosh I am using is built in a BitFenix prodigy (white), I is equipped with an Antec Kühler 60 closed water cooling system and 1.6GHz DDR3 RAM. Speaking of the cooling system, the fan provided by Antec was too noisy for my taste, hence, I used the back fan provided by BitFenix for the radiator.

This blog is about overclocking... now that you know the baseline, let's talk about overclocking!

After some experimentation, I came up with the following parameters:

Base clock frequency: 109MHz
CPU clock ratio: 46 - resulting in a CPU clock of 5.01GHz
RAM clock at 1.744GHz (the RAM I am using being rated at 1.6GHZ)
Cinebench (on OS-X) reports a CPU score of 5.84 pts


CPU temperatures, running SETI@home at full cpu power, stayed below 50C.

Mind you, I am running a water cooled system! Overclocking from 3.80GHz to 5GHz is not nothing...