After rebuilding the system with the upgraded components, the next order of business was to overclock the CPU and find out what type of speeds I would be able to extract out of it. The process left me wanting. On the one hand, the H70 cooler was doing an extraordinary job keeping the quad core CPU very cool. Even pushing 1.4V and over 4GHz the cores were barely breaking 70 degrees Celsius while running IntelBurnTest.
On the other hand (and I had been forewarned) was the motherboard’s over current protection (OCP) circuit, which was preventing me from giving the CPU anymore more voltage than that. OCP is a protection mechanism built into the motherboard to prevent damage to the power circuits due to excessive current. Therefore, my “stable” overclock on the CPU was limited to about 4GHz as seen on page 5.
The good news is that I only put minimal weight in stress testing, and all my benchmarks ran stable at 4.2GHz with a bit higher voltages. This is due to the fact that gaming does not put the load, or require the current, that stress testing does. So, for all testing shown, the i5 750 CPU used was run at 4.2GHz.