Originally posted by: harpoon84
And yet Kentsfield overclocks to 3.4 - 3.5GHz on air in most reviews. How do you explain that? Intel cherry picks good chips for reviews? XS people are getting good overclocks out of ES Kentsfields too, maybe Intel cherry picks those ES chips as well to gain good publicity?
Seriously though, wattage only becomes an issue with overclocking when it can no longer be sufficiently cooled. I'd fathom a guess that a Kentsfield @ 3.5GHz with a voltage bump would be pushing the 200W mark - probably the limits of effective and quiet air cooling on the best HSFs. Scythe Infinity anyone? If you can afford a $1000 CPU a $50 HSF is peanuts, really.
Of course they were cherry picked...that's pretty much standard practice for both AMD and Intel on their top chips for review. But that really isn't the point...
I was pointing out exactly what Anand said in his review about overclocking the Kentsfield:
"You lose some overclocking headroom given the added heat output of the extra die on the chip, not to mention that both die have to be capable of running at the overclocked speed"
Even though you can attain the higher clocks, remember that throttling kicks in much faster due to the higher heat. So, even though the clockspeed can go much higher, that will actually slow things down in terms of performance (unless you can use some exotic cooling) because of the throttling.
This is much less true for the C2D dual cores as the heat is much less...