I was lucky enough to find an I7 4980HQ selling for $400 through Amazon, and I found a dirt cheap $50 reference board to fit it. I also happen to not need my school desktop at the moment and thought I'd try to see how far I could push a mobile CPU when it's being cooled by something capable like my Hyper 212 Evo with some Gelid Extreme. It turns out mounting the cooler on Intel's reference board is, ah, not possible (not really surprised. So, me being me, I propped up the cooler, ran twine through the mounting holes, yanked hard, and it currently stands up straight with a good spread of Gelid. Ghetto mount successful.

It's commonly heard that mobile CPUs are nothing like their desktop counterparts, but honestly looking at the 4980HQ against the 4770k and doing some rough measurements, the only differences are the pin arrangement, the size of the heat spreader, and of course the iGPU being much more powerful. There isn't as much PCIe lane allocation, and there are fewer expansion port options, but I figure that's more Intel's interconnect/socket choice than it is the silicon itself.

I turn the board on, it posts well enough, and then we see the BIOS. Ew... Don't ever do this to yourself without consulting a guide from Intel/a veteran. It's ugly. It's Biostar ugly, only with no real GUI to speak of. I then moved on to installing Windows 7. It went by pretty quickly, and the Hyper 212 only turned on once in the whole process. I was worried for a bit I'd fry the CPU, but it didn't happen.

Yadda yadda installed CPUz, IBT, Prime95, and all the monitor software. On the desktop in balanced mode I'm running at 2.0 GHz. On power saver, 1.4 ish. IBT starts up, it's going at 4.0GHz and the Hyper 212 goes to work. I was quite impressed. The chip never got above 63C, and this is of course with my ghetto mount and being in a standard room temperature room with no other airflow to speak of.

The 4980HQ is locked, boo, but BCLK over clocking is still viable. I disabled Turbo Mode with quite a bit of difficulty because you can actually get trapped in some of the BIOS menus and have to hit escape to save and boot up between option changes. I also set the BCLK to 120, something you'd think would go catastrophically wrong. On stock voltage it ran perfectly IBT stable for 8 hours at 3.36 GHz full time. Then I ticked up the vcore by 0.08 and aimed for BCLK 130. Again, shockingly, it ran IBT stable for 8 hours (my school day and my sleep roughly).

At 135, it broke. Boohoo. VCore at 1.36 (the limit of what the reference board can do, trust me) couldn't save it. Back down at BCLK 105, I tried Vcore 1.20 and Turbo. Well hot damn I got 4.199GHz on IBT stability, and the core temp never broke 65C. I tried 108, had to tick up VCore to 1.22. I managed to get all the way to BCLK 112 before I hit a brick wall and could go no further with any combination of voltages, memory timings, what have you. 4.477 GHz was my best clock at Vcore 1.29 and sitting at a toasty 82C. I tried Cinebench just for shits and giggles. I got 917. Dead on tied with a 4770k at 4.5GHz. Well, it was a fun project, and stupid/expensive, but hopefully I can get a good deal from someone on Amazon or Ebay to buy these off me.

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