You’ve probably noticed this extreme Yorkfield QX9770 is simply a “speed bump” of the Yorkfield QX9650. Although it symbolizes a speed bump, Intel is not just taking the clock speed to 3.2GHz on this chip, they are also raising the FSB to 1600MHz in order to provide additional system bus and memory bandwidth, which also makes it the first 1600MHz desktop processor. In one word, it gives more rooms for overclocking on this baby with great multiplier.

The QX9770 yields a 3.2 GHz core frequency (an increase of 200MHz from QX9650), a 12MB chunk of L2 cache, and was built on the 45nm Hafnium-based High-K process and features a new SSE4 instruction set. I got this chip running at a stable 4.4GHz on air cooling, plenty more rooms for oc’ing on water cooling (It could easily hit 5GHz). Although the QX9770 is slightly cheaper than the QX9775, it is still asking for about 1.5k a piece. Well, at least the X48 motherboard is half of the Skulltrail motherboard but with only single processor support. You get what you pay.

This post is tagged CPU, Intel, QX9650, QX9770, X48