It's finally here, the moment we've all been waiting for. The public is graced with 45nm technology and it comes in the form of Intel's Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz Wolfdale.

So, what's next? Do you plug it in, apply stock cooling and enjoy 45nm technology at a cruising speed of 3.0 Ghz with 6MB of L2 Cache. Or do you get a decent heat sink, pump the little sucker with as much juice it can take, laugh at the void warranty sticker in hopes of reaching uncharted overclocking boundaries. Lets do the latter.

The following guide is a short "how to" for anyone interested in overclocking their E8400 with a P35 Chipset motherboard.

Test System

• Intel Core 2 Duo e8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W
  
• DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX
  
• Team Xtreem 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) 4-4-4-10 TXDD2048M800HC4DC
• Thermalright Ultra-120 CPU Extreme
• CORSAIR CMPSU-620HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 620W Power Supply
• EVGA 768-P2-N831-AR GeForce 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
  
• LIAN LI PC-V1200Aplus II Silver Aluminum ATX Mid Tower

We chose to use DFI's Blood Iron motherboard for two reasons. It was cheap and it uses the LanParty "Genie BIOS" settings. In other words, we wanted as much performance per price as possible. However, we would like to point out that the price for the Blood Iron board has increased roughly 17%, since the release of Intel's E8400.

The same goes for our choice in RAM. Team group produces great modules and are well known among modding enthusiast. Furthermore, not being as recognised among the mainstream their prices are well below those of your current memory giants. Lastly, DFI had listed the TXDD2048M800HC4DC modules, among others,  as recommended overclocking memory for the Blood Iron board.

**** Before installing the E8400 be sure to update your BIOS ****

Get the latest BIOS at DFI's website and thanks to the "Diamond Flash Image" software, flashing your BIOS is now quick and easy.

BIOS Setup

Once you're done flashing, go to "Genie BIOS settings" and then CPU Features. There are some key features that need to be changed before you can start overclocking. Disable all options except the last one, as shown above.

For voltage settings we increased the CPU VID from auto to +300mV and left the CPU VTT voltage at 1.20V. The rated voltage for this particular RAM is between 2.0 - 2.2V. However, 2.125 - 2.150V was enough to keep our system stable. In addition, we loosened the timings from 4-4-4-10 to 5-5-5-18. North bridge settings were not changed.

Finally, we lowered the DRAM speed to 333/667 and increased the CPU Clock to 478Mhz.

Results

Our system has been running stable, at 4.3Ghz, for quite some time now. No problems have been encountered when playing games, using Media Center or rendering videos. The CPU voltage might be a bit too high for our taste since it's above the recommended rate and we were hoping to get a good overclock on 1.36V.

A slight problem did occur when measuring temperatures. Different applications would tell a different story and the numbers would lie between 38°C to 51°C. Drop a note in the comment section if there's an application that measure temps for the E8400 correctly.

4.3Ghz is not the limit and reports of more insane overclocks have been popping up on the internet. Most however, include increasing the voltage even further. With a slight increase in clock speed we were able to run 3DMark06 with a total core speed of 4.365Ghz. However, this slight increase caused some instability issues, especially in Media Center.

Feel free to post your OC scores in our E8400 topic on the Q&A board.