Overclocking
After our Clarkdale overclocking exploits yielded very healthy overclocks—speeds of 4.4 and 4.5GHz for the two chips we tried—I had high expectations for their Gulftown cousin. Since the 980X has an unlocked multiplier, I simply turned up the multiplier and CPU core voltage in order to overclock it.

At its stock 1.25V, our Gulftown didn't take well to higher frequencies—a humble 3.6GHz was all it would do. Fortunately, taking the voltage up to 1.41V did the trick, and our 980X was stable with a 31X multiplier, which should yield 4.13GHz. In fact, I left Turbo Boost enabled during my overclocking attempts, and once the system had booted into Windows, the 980X simply ran at 4.26GHz pretty much all of the time, with one thread or 12, even during our Prime95 torture test. That's a bit better than the 4GHz we coaxed out of our Core i7-975 a while back.

Here's how the 980X performs at that speed. (Note that I've also included a few other overclocked CPUs from here. The "H57" notations are explained there.)

You're really not going to extract much more out of DiRT 2 with a faster CPU, I'm afraid, but Cinebench is clearly another story entirely. Good grief.

What about power consumption at this speed and voltage?

Now you can see why Intel chose to hold the line on clock frequencies for Gulftown. There's room in the 32-nm process, obviously, to reach higher speeds, but you'll need to increase the voltage to get there. Higher voltage means exponentially higher power draw, taking the Core i7-980X well outside of the established power and heat boundaries.

Fortunately, though, Intel's cooler for the Core i7-980X is up to the task of cooling the CPU when it's overclocked to this degree. In our torture tests, using the cooler's Performance mode, CPU temperatures were in the high fifties Celsius and steady. The fan wasn't exactly silent at that point, but it was a good deal quieter than the worst CPU and GPU coolers I've heard.