Ben Hardwidge is delighted to see ASRock’s Sky OC tech bringing overclocking back to its rule-breaking roots

’ll let you into a little secret. Most of the time, my Core i7 CPU isn’t overclocked. I bought a K-series chip, of course – I want the option to push my CPU to its limits for benchmarking, or if I’m running software that really needs it. However, it runs at stock speed for over 90 per cent of the time. It’s not so much that there’s no longer any need for overclocking, but that the top-end K-series CPUs are ironically the chips that need to be overclocked the least. They’re already powerful enough for most people

The chips that really benefit from overclocking are the cheap ones. When I first got into overclocking, back in the 1990s, neither Intel nor AMD approved of overclocking. In fact, they fought hard against it, which is why we ended up with locked multipliers in the first place. At this time, overclocking wasn’t a willy-waving exercise for people with the most expensive components, but a way for cash-strapped enthusiasts to effectively get the performance of an expensive CPU for the price of a cheaper one.

We now have CPUs that Intel and AMD have given us their blessing to overclock but, with the exception of the aging Pentium G3258, they’re all at the pricier end of the scale. Unless you’re using these CPUs for very processor-limited loads, though, which generally doesn’t include gaming, you get little benefit from the clock speed boost.

As such, I’m delighted to see that ASRock has found a way to overclock non K-series CPUs using the base clock (see p15). At the time of writing, several other motherboard makers had revealed similar plans too. It’s debatable how long this feature will be available, and whether Intel will be happy about it continuing, but it’s much more in the spirit of overclocking than tweaking expensive unlocked CPUs.

Overclocking should be about breaking the rules, and using your expertise to get performance that’s genuinely useful, rather than superfluous. The big deal about being able to overclock non-K series CPUs isn’t that you can buy a Core i7-6700 instead of a Core i7-6700K, but that you can buy a much cheaper Core i3-6100 for less than £100 and, according to ASRock, push it to 4.4GHz. Or, if you want more multi-threading power, you could buy a lower-clocked Core i5 chip for £55 less than the 6600K, but overclock it to the same frequency as the 6600K

Given that, even now, few games make extensive use of more than two CPU cores, such a setup would provide a foundation for a great budget gaming rig when it’s overclocked. Combine it with a cheap Z170 motherboard, 8GB of memory and a Radeon R9 380 card and you’ll get a decent Skylake gaming system, complete with Hyper-Threading, for a surprisingly low price

Unless you’re into competitive benchmarking, or you regularly run software that responds well to high CPU frequencies, there isn’t really any point in overclocking an expensive and already powerful CPU. In fact, doing so will just involve increasing the speed of your cooling fans, creating more noise, while also bumping up your electricity bill. This new era of base clock overclocking has the potential to bring overclocking back to its roots, opening it up to people without masses of money to spend, and that’s what it should be all about