[section_title title=Overclocking]
Overclocking
With a firm emphasis on gaming performance and the like, the ASUS ROG series motherboards are known for their superb overclock ability; I would go as far as saying they are legendary. Any top overclocker worth their salt has used an ASUS ROG motherboard over the years whether that be Intel’s socket 775, 1156 or even AMD’s 990FX AM3+ chipset; ASUS have major SKU’s in virtually all major mainstream chipsets, especially with their Republic of Gamers series.
Now Skylake is a different kettle of fish to various over chipsets with similar LGA socket pin-outs such as LGA 1155 and LGA 1150 etc. What I mean is it’s not just as simple these days as changing a multiplier and upping voltage, there are many different variables to factor in and it actually requires an element of skill! Our Intel Core i7 6700k is certainly capable of overclocking very nicely to 5GHz, but what’s the deal with the Z170 Maximus VIII Impact ITX board? Can something so small pack a mighty and powerful punch?
Well the answer is yes thanks to the ASUS UEFI BIOS which is a breeze to navigate around; they even have pre-sets which can be used to overclock based on a baseline of average settings. It should be noted that not all chips are capable of these speeds, but the majority of them will be! Another factor to consider is cooling, it’s an ITX board with a lot of components bunched close together and a mighty full size digital power phase board attached to the top of the board; serious firepower, but with more worry of extra heat. Since we used the Noctua NH-D15 CPU cooler, we knew temps weren’t going to be too much of an issue, but I was surprised at how the board performed, thermally and of course in terms of overclocking headroom.
I managed to get a stable 5GHz overclock with a voltage of 1.45v on the VCore in the BIOS; CPU-Z shows 1.351v, which does aim to confuse, but CPU-Z has been known to bug out before and we expect this was the case.
To see how far we could push the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact motherboard, I went as far as I could go, I managed to hit 5.2GHz with 1.5v, but this was very unstable; I did however manage to get 5.1GHz out of the chip on this board, although it wasn’t 100% stable in benchmarks such as Cinebench 11.5 etc.
Overall, a very decent showing by the ASUS Z170 Maximus VIII Impact motherboard, but does it do enough to satisfy me?
