Really, way better? What like 50% or something? Plenty of people running 6.9ghz on their water cooling setups are they, oh sry maybe you meant 20% better surely there are tons of people running 5.4 on water... whats that oh you meant less than 10% better. Your choice of words do you a disservice. IBs heat limitations are well documented as a combination of smaller more dense cores and a possible negative performance of the IHS and thermal compound compared to previous chips which was changed due to increased thermal cycling because of the denser cores (according to intel). If you want way better performance you need to go sub ambient and normal water cooling doesn't do that.
Go read forums like overclock.net and xtremesystems.org and you'll see. People who go beyond bolt on solutions for cooling are getting good results. Yes way better...it's no secret that a high end water loop can achieve temps much lower than even my NH-D14 can. It's just a lot more expensive.
You can come here and talk all you want but you still don't know what you're talking about. My CPU can go much higher than 4.6Ghz, I've had it up to 4.9. It may have even been stable if I could get the temps down. I'm sure if I did some modding (de-lid) and did a custom water loop with all the high performance stuff I could get it 24/7 at 4.9 or maybe even higher. I'm just not willing to do that or to spend the cash for top of the line water.
All you IVB haters are the same.
Someone had mentioned something before about "IB showing different profiles" than earlier processors. What you say here now makes it understandable as to why.
What is the upper bound to a "safe" voltage range on the 22nm Ivy Bridgers, anyway?
Per "cmdrdredd" and remarks. It doesn't matter how much you can cool down a processor; you're still going to twist up the voltage to get those high clocks, and it will still lead to electro-migration and processor damage, even at 10C load temperature.
No cause there's people who ran LN2 and got high clocks below stock voltage. It's not always voltage. Even some reviews mentioned that with their IB chips they got stuck on temps before they got stuck on the chip just not running the clock speed. It can scale really well, but you need the cooling solution to do it.