The Problem With Overclocking On Non-Z170 Chipsets

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Nice article. Hopefully people read it before jumping in blind thinking they'll get max performance on the cheap. Getting an additional boost is nice but it sort of goes back to the point of using the right tool for the right job. The z/k series exist for a reason. I'm hoping people take the time to do a little research and read this article before making poor board choices.
 


I hope so too. The ASRock non-Z170 OC boards should work well enough with any non-Hyper-Threaded CPU, but I have a feeling we will still see lots of people try to use a Core i3 or locked Core i7 and complaining because their CPU doesn't have Hyper-Threading enabled.
 
This is another reason that AMD's performance issues are bad for everyone as a whole. You can bet that if AMD chips could still compete and overclock with all features enabled this wouldn't be a problem. Sadly I don't think we'll ever return to the time when there were two high performance x86-a64 companies so the problems will only get worse.
 
Unless I read the article wrong, it sounds like it's not intel, it's the motherboard companies to blame if they offer an overclocking non z motherboard that gimps cpu features. Intel didn't tell them to do that, they made that choice. Same as motherboard manufacturers making skylake boards with ddr3 support despite intel's warnings, if something goes wrong and damages the memory controller built into the cpu people will try to blame intel.

They need to start paying attention to who is actually responsible and place the blame where it belongs, on the motherboard makers. The motherboard manufacturers are promising the world and making a bunch of choices that may have negative results just to sell their product because it sounds good in a sales pitch.
 
Ill stick to my AMDs thanks, no restricted overclocking, among many other things, CMON ZEN! ill wait.

Heck, im still running a 6 year old x6 1090T @ 4.2GHz on Air and a 970. no issues with games here as long as i dont try 4K! lol
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Want to add an extra 5-10% FPS in your games with no need to change your vid card? Switch to an Intel CPU. Check the benches.
 


Yes, OEMs are the one to blame if an issue arises from this. Intel designs the chipsets with a set of features, OEMs are supposed to use it as is, not modify it. But trying to gain an edge on the competition and give users what they want, they are altering chipsets to add overclocking features where none should exist.
 
FX was a great alternative, 3yrs ago. Problem is AMD hasn't made any improvements, while Intel has, if only 5-10% per gen, since sandy bridge. Broadwell was mostly power and igp improvements, so excluding that, you are still looking at 15%-30% increase while FX has been stagnant. If AMD would have been able to bring steamroller into the FX lineup, it probably would have been a decent alternative still, as IPC did improve. Sadly, they had to leave it on the FM2+ lineup.
 
What a bunch of blather going on here.
Here is link to the boards and BIOS for OC of non K skylake
With examples on one of each ASUS ASROCK Gigabyte and MSI.
There is some benchmarks on the site too.
http://overclocking.guide/intel-skylake-non-k-overclocking-bios-list/
 


Did you read the article? I know you didn't, but it would be nice if you could read it before commenting.

You seem to have missed that this article is focused on non-Z170 chipsets such as the H170, H110, B150, Q170, Q150, C236 and C232 chipsets. Overclocking non-K CPUs on a Z170 chipset is a completely different thing that basically all of the motherboard OEMs have implemented at this point, but not all of them are going to enable overclocking on other chipsets.
 
A whole list of z series motherboards which allow overclocking to dispute non z boards with unofficial overclocking woes. Nice. Some people would rather complain than bother reading the article. So busy making an argument they miss the forest for the trees.
 
Super Micro only has an edge if they drop the price on their board. If I have to pay the same for their OCing H board as I would for a Z board, I'm going with the officially supported product.
 


Don't you love when the uninformed try to act as though they are the voice of reason. Guess my first post didn't deter them all.
 


The I7-6700K is priced very high. I mean, that thing started out at $350 and is now at $420 minimum (pcpartpicker latest price). I'd almost always recommend X99 any day to Z170, plus we got Broadwell-E coming up, probably another bang-for-the-buck hex-core I7-6800K that will blow away the 6700K.
 
Well the unfortunate side to that is that Super Micro's h170 board doesn't support the Xeon CPUs. Honestly, that is a bit surprising because you think it would be easier to add support for the Xeon CPUs than to enable overclocking, but motherboard OEMs haven't done it. Super Micro builds a lot of server and workstation oriented parts, so I would expect to see a C232 or C236 chipset form them eventually with overclocking, but we don't get it yet.

Xeon's have been a better budget choice in recent years, but Intel is trying hard to end that.
 
What is the word on the Z-270 models of motherboards, perhaps someone knows of a rumor that it will enable these types of OCing that will run as wished, that is, without negative repercussions for non-K cpus.
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Intel will be against overclocking non-K CPUs for the foreseeable future, and thus will continue locking these CPUs down as much as possible and otherwise hindering such efforts. They've done an impressive job of it too, thus far - even with board manufacturers making all efforts to allow overclocking of non-K CPUs, even on Z boards we still have caveats and limitations when overclocking non-K CPUs.

I find these limits annoying since I'm fond of combining relatively inexpensive CPUs with solid but basic motherboards and making it run a lot faster on a budget. But products in recent years have put a damper on such things, now I rarely bother. I am somewhat hopeful that Zen will have a lot of unlocked models at affordable prices and this will spur more K releases from Intel. A K series dual-core with HT would be nice, and I think a lot of the K CPUs shouldn't bother with the iGPU. Probably not very likely, though.
 
A K series dual core with hyperthreading would be interesting to say the least. I doubt we'll ever see that though, as it would undermine their other offerings, same as the overclocking issue. Or, they'd have to charge enough for it to make it not worth having over an i5. Either scenario makes it improbable.
 
I don't think I've seen a clear answer yet. Do the 10-series H boards offer just multiplier OCing ( similar to the 8- and 9-series ) or do they offer BLKC adjustment as well? Or is the answer to that dependent on make/model?
 


Hey Thomas. Lol I'm not surprised honestly, did they ask you to only use CPUs without Hyper-Threading support? I don't think they wanted to mention this at first. Wouldn't have even known about it if it wasn't for Asus and MSI bringing it up, so I circled back to them and they confirmed it when asked directly.

@RedJaron: They offer BLCK overclocking, not multiplier. To my knowledge none of the motherboard OEMs have tried to unlock the multiplier, or if they have, none have reported having an unlocked multiplier so they probably had a lot of trouble with it. On Skylake, doesn't really matter though.
 
Huh, so it's reversed of the 9-series. BCLK only instead of multiplier. Most of these threads and articles simply mentioned the boards could OC, but not which methods. And I believe the big BCLK story was written about an i3 on a Z170 board, so nothing new there in terms of mboard OCing ability.
 
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