Overclocking
We decided to overclock both chips using the same methodology so as to keep a level playing field. We raised the CPU voltage a fraction, to 1.30V, which we consider a safe limit for long-term running. Both CPUs ran at below 75°C using a single Noctua fan.
This is the first time we've seen a quad-core chip eke past the 1,000-mark barrier.
4,850MHz is a decent frequency for a quad-core processor. A company, who shall remain nameless, has tested 30 Core i7-7700K processors and reckoned that 'good' chips can do 5GHz with 1.29V whilst bad chips need 1.35V for the same speed. It appears that we have a bad chip because the processor was only semi-stable at 5GHz at 1.35V. We're genuinely interested to see how next month's retail chips perform with our setup.
And because we have tested at sensible settings with the Asus GeForce GTX 1080 Strix Gaming GPU, overclocking the CPUs makes scant difference. We also checked the minimum framerates for various games and found little-to-no improvement when pushing the CPU.