ive overclocked many PC's; discovered today i have an issue with the motherboard after all. the systems were generally unstable over 3.7 on the 920's, the 950 i have run up to 4.089Ghz with no stability issues after some work. This is on different motherboards however (P55 mATX and X58 mATX).

the Asus board is going back tomorrow.

Today I've discovered the weaknesses of my specific i7-950 CPU: I could not get it to run stably above 3.8GHz without requiring a massive increase in the CPU core voltage (although 3.8GHz did require a slight bump in the CPU core voltage).

And my CPU did run hotter than it should have because my set voltages in the CPU were out of whack: By default, the CPU Load Level Calibration was set to "follow Intel's official spec" (which means a high amount of Vdroop). This setting would have required a significantly higher CPU core voltage setting than other settings, which means that the CPU would end up with too much voltage where it doesn't need it.

That said, my mid-70s temps at 3.8GHz were during the running of Prime95. But it would be considerably lower most of the time (the CPU temp was just below 40°C at idle).

Re: My thoughts on a higher-model i7
 

An update:

I have just recently managed to get a stable 4.01GHz out of my i7-950 without excessive overheating of the CPU. This has improved my system's overall time on the PPBM5 list - from 260 seconds to 243 seconds. Not the best performance overall for an overclocked i7-950, but quite good considering the 12GB of RAM and a less-than-optimal working disk setup (only a single two-disk RAID 0 array with 7200 rpm hard drives). Doubling that to 24GB would have improved that score noticeably (especially the MPEG score) - but I can no longer afford replacing all of that 6 x 2GB of RAM with new 6 x 4GB modules at this time.