Intel Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000 on the Dell M1730

Overclocking The X9000 Processor

The new Intel Extreme mobile processor we are looking at today is part of the new Penryn family and is clocked at 2.8 GHz with an 800 MHz FSB and 6MB of L2 cache.

A quick look at GPU-Z shows that everything is up and running right on the Inrel Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor. It also shows correctly that the processor is built on the 45nm process. Notice that the multiplier is set to 14 at default.

The BIOS on the Dell M1730 shows the clock speeds of the processors and how much cache that it has to offer.

The slickest feature of the BIOS on the Dell XPS M1730 has to be overclocking. Under the performance menu in the BIOS there is a section called ‘CPU Overclock Support’. By clicking enter and using the arrow keys you can increase the CPU frequency on the X9000 by 200MHz at a time. The Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor is easily overclocked since it is part of the Extreme series and has unlocked multipliers. Basically, this BIOS setting just increases the multipler one level at a time until the BIOS limits you at 3.4GHz. The question is can the X9000 be pushed from 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz by just increasing the multiplier?

Just for fun, we tried each setting in the BIOS and ran some benchmarks to make sure each setting was fully stable. The end results were impressive and we were able to top the system out at 3.4GHz with full stability.

With the X9000 overclocked to 3.4GHz, we can see that the multiplier has been increased from 14 to 17, which is how the overclock took place. By increasing just the multiplier it means that no additional overclocking or stress is put on other devices that are driven off the Front-Side Bus (FSB). The memory clock frequency remained at 667MHz, which is nice as you don’t have to worry about memory being the limiting factor in the system.

One thing to note about overclocking on the Dell XPS M1730 is that the fans get really loud when running at 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz. It is loud enough to say that you wouldn’t want to run it at these two settings unless you are trying to run some impressive performance benchmarks!