Gadgetory

just yesterday word broke that asrock will be enabling overclocking support for all non case Guide processors on their z170 motherboards this is a seriously big deal for a few reasons firstly for the past five years overclocking an on key Intel processor has been futile with fully locked multipliers the only way to boost the frequency of an ankh a processor is to increase the base clock and that hasn't been proven terribly successful even for the most experienced overclockers for those of you not up to speed with base clocks and multipliers here's a quick explanation a cpu such as the core i3 6100 which operates 3.7 gigahertz features a 100 megahertz base clock multiplied 37 times resulting in the 3700 megahertz operating frequency this multiplier is only unlocked on the K processors such as the 6600 K and 6700 K the base clock has always been adjustable but unfortunately the design of Sandy Bridge Ivy Bridge and Haswell architectures didn't lend themselves well to base clock overclocking overclocking past 103 to say 105 megahertz wasn't really possible doing so result in data loss and consequently stability issues the limitation comes from the fact that these architectures link other parts of the system to the base clock such as storage in the PCIe interface it was rumored that skylight would change all of that and finally enable worthwhile base clock overclocking the Skype design now sees a chipset and PCIe fee to the ronin clock domains meaning the base frequency only affects the CPU cores uncor cache integrated graphics and DRAM despite the design changes this should have made sky more accepting of higher base clock frequencies we found the same old story frequencies greater than 103 megahertz wouldn't even allow the system to post this is what makes as Rob's latest achievement really exciting is expected they'll publicly release a new biased revision for each and every one of their z170 motherboards making it possible to successfully overclock any 9k intel skylake processor I've been lucky enough to acquire said bias for my fatalities dead 170 gaming K 6 + motherboard and after racing down to my local computer store this morning I'm now the proud owner of a core i5 6400 and pentium g 4400 i also have a core i3 6100 on hand as well previously these processes are locked their default operating frequencies which saw the pentium g 4400 operating at 3.3 gigahertz the core i3 6100 suck at 3.7 gigahertz and the core i5 6400 running at 2.7 gigahertz frequency with the turbo-boost speed of up to three point three gigahertz without rocks new base clock overclocking bias we expect all three processes to reach well over four gigahertz and that's exactly what we found the pentium g 4400 an Intel Core i3 6100 both overclocked to a stable four point six two gigahertz while the Intel Core i5 6400 maxed out a four point three two gigahertz still that's a 31% increase over the i-5 6400 turbo frequency and a huge 40 percent overclock for the G 4400 so now let's go to the benchmark lab and see how these overclocks translate performance wise right away we see some nice performance gains in 7-zip the g 4400 became 38% faster the i3 6100 enjoyed a twenty two percent performance gain in the i-5 6400 decent eleven percent performance gain PC mark seven obviously isn't a heavily threaded application as all three overclock sky processors delivered a similar score overclock the g 4400 almost matched the stock i3 6100 score while the overclocked I 360 100 almost matched the stock i5 6400 score meanwhile the core i5 6400 multi-threaded score was boosted by 36 percent once overclocked the single thread results were interesting and here the G 4400 I 360 195 6400 all produced similar scores which were also in line with the core i7 6700 K Just Cause 3 doesn't play well with dual cores and here we see the stock G 4400 dropping down to a minimum of 20 FPS with the radiant are no fury acts installed overclocked the G 4400 game four frames for the minimum frame rate and 36% more performance from looking at the average frame rate the i3 6100 did better out of the box with the minimum 29 fps but here much faster than the G 4400 even when overclocked boosting the i3 6100 to 4.6 to gigahertz increase the average frame rate by just 12% I have to say we're expecting a bigger boost here the i-5 6400 started with an average of 57 frames and enjoyed a 16% performance boost once overclocked hitting 66 FPS on average that said it was still a percent slower than the stock core i7 6700 K I'm not sure why the AMD FX 8350 is showing such bad performance in the ashes of the singularity benchmark but it isn't important for this test the game is still in the beta phase as well so that should be noted moving on we find the overclocked G 4400 is 21% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate while the iPhone 6100 becomes 22% faster the i5 6400 also saw a 21 percent performance boost for the minimum frame rate once overclocked and was actually one frame per second faster than the core i7 6700 K all our poor doesn't play nicely with dual core processors at all and the standard G 4400 gets absolutely slayed overclocking certainly helps here though while the minimum frame rate did double it's still exceedingly slow at 20 fps the i3 6100 started at 26 FPS out of the box and our overclock boosted that result by 23% to 32 frames per second the i5 6400 Rose overclocked to perform almost on par with the core i7 6700 K as the minimum frame rate increased by 27% an impressive result indeed finally we have some power consumption numbers which were recorded using the Cinebench r15 multi-threaded test please note that these our entire system consumption figures the G 4400 system consumed is 77 watts in that figure jumped by 47 percent once overclocked reaching 113 watts the i3 6100 started at just 84 watts and that figure jumped by 42% reaching 119 watts once overclocked by far the biggest power consumption game was seen when overclocking the i5 6400 as a went from 91 watts to 174 watts a massive 91% increase in 18% more than the stock i7 6700 K so they have it overclocking like it was the good old days before we get too excited let's put all of these results into context it's important to remember that this base clock overclocking support is limited to Zed 170 motherboards and for now as Roffe is the only board maker to release the workaround bios that we expect others to follow suit such as the Zeus MSI and Super Micro for example as it stands as rocks most affordable z170 motherboard cost 110 dollars around twice that of the cheapest budget h1 10 motherboards typically we'd recommend pairing a CPUs such as the core i3 6100 with an h1 10 motherboard at a combined cost of around $190 adding a Zed 170 motherboard to the equation will inflate that cost by over 25% with the performance gains around the 20 to 25% range at best there isn't much to gain here the core i5 6400 on the other hand only cost 20% more on the dead 170 platform we suspect most want to pair the $190 processor with entails flagship chipset overclocked to 4.3 gigahertz the core i5 6400 wasn't a great deal slower than the $340 core i7 6700 K in a number of our tests therefore we feel that the core i5 6400 and as Rob said 170 xtreme3 will make the ultimate $300 combo coincidentally for a limited time the asrock z170 pro 4s has just dropped to 80 dollars on newegg.com so that could be a viable option for those in the market for a skylight core i3 processor although not as straightforward as multiplayer overclocking the base clock is still a relatively easy method all three of our overclocks on the g 4400 a 360 100 and I 5 6400 proved very reliable and we're confident these overclocks will be the norm although it means now save Intel updates the processors microcode to disable the overclock which Intel being Intel they're likely to do thanks for watching another installment of hardware unbox if you haven't seen our 22-game benchmark comparison of the r9 390x vs. gtx 980 then be sure to check it out by clicking the thumbnail here yeah