Seeing as it’s Thursday once again, it’s time for us to take a quick stroll down memory lane. This week however you won’t have to think too far back, in fact just two years ago to a day in September 2014 when Germany’s der8auer penned a very helpful guide article about how to get the maximum performance from a Haswell-E processor. It’s actually a genuinely impressive bit of reverse engineering that shold tickle the spidey sense of any extreme overclocker.

Here’s a taste of what der8auer was writing back in 2014:

“So in order to achive higher uncore clocks we have to modify some of the CPU voltages. This means we have to mod the CPU. Yes – talking about modding a USD $1,000 processor. There are two ways how to do this. The first way is the “lazy solution” and depending on your chip and board you should be able to run 4000-4200 MHz with this mod. For everything above you have to step up to solution two.”

“I was trying to find the difference between the OC-Socket and the normal LGA2011 socket. So I just took the X99-SOC Force (no OC-Socket) and the X99-SOC Force LN2 (with OC-Socket) and measured the differences between the pins. After that I soldered thin wires to the empty pins of the CPU and measured the voltages while it was running. I came across two additional voltages which are not supplied on the normal socket, but are present on the OC-Socket. However the CPU internally supplies itself with different voltages there.The key is to get both of these to the same level and increase if you need even higher clocks. Since I have no pin-out of the OC-Socket or pin-in of the CPU itself I will name this “uncore supply voltage”.”

Nice work from a true hardware modding master. You can read the full guide from Sept 29, 2014 here on HWBOT.