Can the i3 2120 be overclocked on a H61 board?

JockJock · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:36

Hi guys. Yet another thread asking for your advice. Basically im looking at upgrading my machine ready for Battlefield 3 (of course

) The problem is im on a budget, max £200 and thats to get me a mobo, processor and Ram, basically everything I need except the graphics card. Im fairly new to overclocking but managed to successfully overclock my existing rig, Intel E5400 from 2.8GHz to a stable 3.11GHz. Basically I face a wait untill afta xmas if I want to go the i5 or i7 route which is not on

so im looking at the i3 but only if I can overclock it so its not a wasted buy. I know the i3 will outperform my E5400 but I feel its a better buy if I can squeeze a few more GHz out of the bugger at a later date.

Your help is much appreciated guys.

Edit: The board and processor are a bundle hence the combination.

Orcvader · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:39

Nope. You can only overclock on a P67/Z68 board, and to make matters worse still, only processors with "K" at the end can be overclocked. That pretty much only leaves you with the 2500K or the 2600K.

However, I have heard an i3 2120K will be released soon.

Jokester · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:41

I think that i3 2120K was a typo on a newsite rather than a real CPU.

ByMRK1 · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:48

How comes my friend overclocked his Intel Core-i5 2300 to 3.8Ghz?

Jokester · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:50

You can still overclock them using the FSB, but they tend to get flaky stability wise fairly quickly.

JockJock · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:52

Bugger. So im looking at buying seperate rather than a bundle? Thats gonna push costs up. But will still have to be done.

Orcvader · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:55

ByMRK1 said:
How comes my friend overclocked his Intel Core-i5 2300 to 3.8Ghz?

It could be the limited overclock: http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/cpu/core-i5-2500-2400-2300/slide-5.png

With the 2300 it's possible to reach 3.8ghz on one core and maybe a it of FSB tweaking, but as other things are tied to the 100mhz base it's a very risky thing to do and could make certain features suffer a lot of instability such as USB, PCI, etc.

cmndr_andi · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:01

As mentioned above, you can do limited overclocking with the i5 non-K CPUs (though it's not nearly as much as the K models), however the i3 doesn't allow even limited overclocking.

That being said, if you can't afford a i5 2500K now, I would still get a good value P67/Z68 board like this one so you can upgrade to the 2500K at a later date (and sell on the i3), as such a board would allow you to overclock a K series chip properly (here is a review of this cheap gigabyte Z68 board).