The BIOS as we saw uses a graphics interface, and we’re big fans of that, as it makes things like overclocking a lot less of a chore and the UEFI BIOS in general displays a much easier way to deal with overclocking.
As we’re dealing with a Sandy Bridge-E based processor, it’s very easy to overclock as it is, and just requires the bare minimum to get some decent clock speeds, and this comes down to the multiplier and core voltage, and not much elase.
There are of course the pre-defined overclocks including 4.6GHz, which is a simple couple of clicks and straight away we saw that we were able to boot at this speed whilst remaining 100% stable. Straight away we can see that ASRock are on to a good thing, and we then decided to see if things could be pushed any further.
A 47x multiplier was immediately shot down as soon as we attempted to boot into Windows, so we decided to pump a few more volts through and to concentrate on the bus speed instead. As you can see we ended just short of 4.7GHz, which is fantastic for a board like this, and on a i7 3960X CPU, as we’ve only managed to hit 5GHz so far under the same conditions, but that was on a board almost twice the price of this.
It’s worth noting that we had to pump the voltage up to around 1.475V to get this overclock, and whilst we could push things further, we didn’t see the benefit by increasing the voltage dramatically more, just to get a possible extra few MHz, so we settled on having a healthy balance of overclock vs power vs temperature, and we believe that we made the right decision in all honesty.
i like the black and gold colour scheme
You used BIOS v1.1 on this board? Or did you update it before testing? ASRock state BIOS must be 1.2 or 1.6 for all socket2011 CPUs.
How are you using USB3? This is not implemented in the Sandy Bridge E (or any CPU that I know of)
We used the latest BIOS at the time.
USB3 is implemented through use of a separate controller; usually ASMedia.