A lot of users will buy a CPU, only if it overclocks well. The Intel XE6800 and more especially the E6600, can overclock very well, provided that you have the proper motherboard and memory combination. Our tests were done with an Asus P5B Deluxe Wi-Fi edition motherboard. The motherboard offers a variety of tweaks that cannot be covered in this article however.

To sum up, the E6600 reached 2.40GHz (9x multiplier * 266.67Mhz FSB). The first and most obvious approach is with the multiplier locked at 9x, increase the FSB. From our tests, we managed to get a stable system at 9x350=3150MHz, running CPU and memory 1:1.

Below are several test results for the above overclocking. We squeezed an extra 750MHz from the E6600, which should allow it to overtake the XE6800, something that our results confirmed: