But interestingly, the absolute first place winner had all 8 cores enabled http://hwbot.org/submission/2615355_the_stilt_cpu_frequency_...
You obviously don't have to cut the cores in half for daily usable overclocking. My quad Skylake runs 4.5GHz with all four cores enabled.
Kaby Lake has bad thermal conductivity between silicone and heat-spreader (metal top of CPU). If you crack-open the CPU and replace thermal paste, it will reduce temperature under load significantly.
It is common problem for Intel CPUs since Ivy Bridge. i7 are affected. Extreme version is soldered and does not have this issue.
I thought this:
> You literally have to cut this CPU in half, to make it usable for OC.
referred to turning off the cores, not delidding :D
But you don't need to do either to "make it usable for OC". Just get a good cooler.
I had i7 2600K at 5.0 GHzx. Water cooled, 90 degrees under full load. It worked for 5 years 24/7, until motherboard died last year, CPU still works.
It is simple to set higher frequency, but that does not mean CPU is actually faster. Power management is very tricky. Sometimes it will put idle instructions, or turbo boost would not work.
You have to run benchmark for several hours to verify CPU is actually faster.
There's also another thermal paste sandwich UNDER that that you'd have to do some very delicate surgery to modify.
But overclockable i3 Kaby Lake is interesting.