The other reason that we decided to review the i7-930 is because one of our contacts at Intel strongly hinted that despite its use of the same D0 stepping as the i7-920, it should be a much better overclocker. This makes a lot of sense, as Intel has been making Core i7s for more than a year, and will continue to make small revisions to the manufacturing process, even if these aren't enough to justify an entirely new stepping.
We started off by slinging our old D0-stepping i7-920 into our LGA1366 test rig and testing it again, as the original review used Vista rather than Windows 7, which we now use for all our product reviews.
Even with a new BIOS for our Asus P6TD Deluxe motherboard, with the vcore boosted to 1.45V, the QPI raised to 204MHz and Turbo Boost disabled, we were only able to overclock the i7-920 from 2.66GHz to 4.08GHz. This is still a great overclock, and increased performance magnificently with all the benchmark results improving accordingly.
In contrast, the i7-930, using exactly the same voltages, but with a CPU multiplier of 21x and QPI of 205MHz, was happy to run for hours on end at 4.3GHz. This is quite frankly a fantastic overclock for a standard LGA1366 Core i7, and more in the realm of what you'd expect from a far more expensive Extreme Edition. At 4.3GHz, the i7-930 returned markably better benchmark results than the overclocked i7-920.
