[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
We have already seen the potential of the Intel LGA 2011-3 socket with its basic fundamental 6 core entry CPU, the Intel Core i7 5820k as well as with our heftier Intel Core i7 5960x chip which contains a full 8 core 16 thread silicone. With that being said, today is not about bigging up the latest range of Intel’s CPUs but to see how good the staple of any system with any processor is, the motherboard. Now overclocking is a highly mainstream thing currently and equates to free performance; effectively could be the difference between generation upgrades so something not to be dismissed.
ASRock’s BIOS as mentioned previously in the review is a very solid, easy one to use so overclocking with the Extreme6/ac was certainly going to be made easier due to this; a very simple process if you know how! Obviously I already know what my Intel Core i7 5960x is capable of due to pre-testing it before hand and 4.5GHz was easily achievable via the Extreme6/ac; although the BCLK was set to 100, it wouldn’t budge from 99.94MHz in CPU-Z. Nevertheless, 4.5GHz is a pretty hefty overclock for an i7 5960x but very achievable by a lot of chips; the main limitation really is the cooling as 8 cores as you can imagine, with hyper threading enabled, can get quite warm!
I did however try for 4.7GHz but for some reason, it won’t boot into Windows like it would with the MSI X99S Gaming 7; not that either board is technically better than each other, but even with an insane amount of tweaking, it just wouldn’t do it. That being said, I did find the ASRock BIOS a lot more user friendly than the MSI UEFI although I am proficient with both; one of the benefits of working with different motherboards all the time. The Extreme6/ac does a good job in my opinion and overclocking ability will of course depend on cooling and silicone lottery; something you have to take into consideration when overclocking anything really…
