Someone lucky at Lab501 forum has managed to get the Core i5-650 engineering sample which is schduled for Q1 launch next year, and shown us its overclocking potential using air-cooling.

Click to enlarge

The Core i5-650 works at a stock clock speed of 3.2GHz, features two cores and four threads, 4MB of L3 cache, along with support for Turbo Boost technology.

The test bed included a Gigabyte P55 motherboard, Noctua NH-U12P cooler, and Coolink SWIF 2 120P fan. The chip achieved a clock speed of 4.7GHz (25x188MHz) with a core voltage of 1.424V, which means performance improvement of nealy 50%. Though it’s just an engineering sample, I guess the overclocking fest gives you a rough idea what the new processor is capable of.

With an ambient temperature of 24℃, the two cores heated up to 77℃ and 68℃.