The BIOS makes overclocking such an easy task, and being fluent in the Asus BIOS really does help. As we use Asus boards on all of our test machines, it does make for an easy overclock as we’re used to the way it works.
Working with Sandy Bridge makes things a lot easier too as it’s all multiplier based overclocking to a certain extent and this makes things quick and easy and with us knowing the limits of our processor on a higher-end board, we know roughly what we can expect from this board.
We knew that 4.6GHz would be possible as this is what we’re using for our test comparison, but we were interested to see how far things could be pushed after that and went straight in for 5GHz. To our amazement, things booted and seemed 100% stable, and due to us being under a Corsair H80, we knew we could play with the voltage a little bit further.
As you can see, we managed a final overclock of 5.1GHz using a 51x multiplier. We managed to boot into Windows and load up Prime to start stressing and after several hours, we find things to appear to be 100% stable. We didn’t bother adjusting the bus speed, as we were happy with a 5.1GHz overclock on a board that really shouldn’t even let us go this far.
Voltage wise, we didn’t have to change to much. We only ended up increasing a few of the voltages, with the main one being the Vcore, which as you can see, got increased to 1.544V to get that extra stability from the board and our 2700k.
I've read in a few places that overclocking isn't as easy as you make it sound, due to not being able to manually set voltages, only being able to use +/- offsets. What was your experience with this? I plan on getting a 2500k with potentially this board, but if it is going to cause some issues I might spend the extra $50 for the non-LX version.
I am running this just now and there is no problem overclocking at all. I am no overclocker so the one hit button and it does it all is great, for the enthusiast you can also delve deeper in to the voltages etc. To be honest it's a great board well worth a look and for the price it's great value for money. I am running 2500K and it sits at 4.5Ghz with only air cooling and that was the one hit button affair. Can you ask for more right now, nah i doubt it. Good luck