The Problem With Overclocking On Non-Z170 Chipsets

[Darkbreeze]

Except the margins. There is much MORE BCLK margin to be had on Skylake than on Haswell, according to what info I've read so far. Haven't tried it myself yet though.

 

[RedJaron]

Oh, I understand the Skylake BCLK change that makes it more meaningful. I'm saying you could do the same on Z97 + i3, even if it was only an extra 5 MHz ( resulting in 150 - 200 MHz on the CPU ).

 

[IInuyasha74]

@RedJaron: You are right, should have been more precise with that, I mention that discovery briefly thinking users would get the idea that it is all BLCK OC, but probably should reinforce that in writing. I have another article about that I am working on now so I will be sure to do that.

@DB: Right, Skylake's OC margin via BCLK seems to be unlimited, or at least unlimited until the CPU core itself becomes unstable.

 

[Crashman]

This explains why ASRock requested that I only use specific processors when testing its unlocked H170 boards.

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.

Yessir, they gave me specific models.

 

[synphul]

I sort of side with intel a bit when it comes to not overclocking non-z cpu's. There's a reason for the binning process and some part of the lower end locked cpu's likely points to the fact they may not be stable when overclocked. With all the warranty claims likely made that don't involve a faulty product as it is, they probably don't want the problem to get any worse. People insist on doing things against manufacturer recommendations.

With all the stories of people bending their cpu's using power drivers to install them, cramming the wrong cpu into the wrong motherboard socket, placing the cpu in wrong at all despite making it as idiot proof as possible with one-way-fitment only designs it's a wonder they even let people buy individual parts and put their own systems together at all. We're probably lucky it's not just dumbed down to soc's only.

It's not realistic for people to be upset or to expect to get top notch speed and performance and features from rock bottom priced parts. That's not a realistic expectation of any product. If that were the case there would be no point in performance oriented vehicles, professional level tools or premium anything. I think it would be great if I could buy a cheap lawn tractor, pop in some fancy spark plugs for $20 and mount full sized farm grade attachments to it and have it do the same work as a $400k professional grade piece of equipment too but wish in one hand and - well, fill the other with something else and see which fills up first.

 

[RedJaron]

I don't blame Intel either. It's their product, they can make it pretty much however they want. I may not like the decisions they made on their products, but they have the right to make them. The OEMs and vendors can then choose whether to follow Intel's specifications or not.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Well, we can blame Intel a bit here. True, they make the CPUs and the chipsets, but they have essentially tried to take complete control in a market that used to use several chipsets and designs from various manufacturers. Go back to 2005 and we had Intel motherboards with chipsets from ATI, Nvidia, Intel, Via, and a few others. If they hadn't locked all other chipset manufacturers out of the business then motherboard OEMs wouldn't have to modify their chipsets to differentiate themselves in a very competitive market. Sure, they managed to do that with several methods over the years, but the more Intel pulls into the CPU, the less they have to work with.

Again, going back about 10 years, you could get chipsets that run the full spectrum from low-end to high-end with overclocking abilities. Of course higher-end boards had more features and did it better, but at least it was there. If motherboard OEMs make it possible on all their boards, they are really just taking things back to that golden day when you had a lot of options and could overclock at least a little on just about anything.

 

[RedJaron]

To play the devil's advocate, I think some of that might be nostalgia speaking. Yes, I have one of those nForce 2 boards that magically unlocks my Athlon XP, so I know of what you speak. However, we need to ask ourselves how much of the performance we're now seeing was enabled by Intel's integration. Would we see the speed and efficiency we have now if they didn't pull those functions onto the die?

 

[Onus]

To add further confusion to this, it seems that ASRock is saying (and proving, with screen shots), that their H-board OCing does NOT disable hyperthreading. I do not [yet] have one of their OC-capable boards to test, but certainly will if I get one. I have yet to find BCLK overclocking in a H170's BIOS, but I've only looked at a couple so far.

 

[IInuyasha74]

To play the devil's advocate, I think some of that might be nostalgia speaking. Yes, I have one of those nForce 2 boards that magically unlocks my Athlon XP, so I know of what you speak. However, we need to ask ourselves how much of the performance we're now seeing was enabled by Intel's integration. Would we see the speed and efficiency we have now if they didn't pull those functions onto the die?

Integration is a good thing, but we could have that and still have third-party chipsets from Nvidia, Via, etc. At this point, Intel's chipsets basically are just a South Bridge, they connect over a bus to the CPU and allow for connectivity devices like USB, SATA,PCI. There isn't any reason a third-party can't design that, they have before. Intel just locked everyone else out of the business.