ASRock bypasses overclocking restrictions with external clock generator chip

ASRock has announced the Fatal1ty H170 Gaming K4 Hyper and Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4 Hyper motherboards. The boards are equipped with a chip that can adjust the clock signal of the processor, so that it is again possible to overclock non-K Skylake CPUs.

The two boards with H170 Express and B150 Express chipset are ASRock’s answer to Intel’s ban on overclocking Skylake processors that are not in the K-series. Motherboard manufacturers previously released some motherboards with overclocking capabilities for cheap Intel chips that are not in the K series. Those boards allowed users to increase the bclk, or base clock frequency, but Intel put a stop to this with a bios update.

ASRock now circumvents that block with an additional chip. That clock generator, which ASRock calls the Hyper BCLK Engine, allows adjusting the bclk in 0.0625MHz increments. “This helps give overclockers more control over their systems,” claims the manufacturer. Incidentally, ASRock previously used this chip, the IDT 6V41542NLG, for its ASRock Z170 OC Formula, a high-end motherboard, and Extreme models, for refining overclocking steps. Increasing the memory clock speeds is also possible, but only with ‘certain memory bars such as Kingston or Samsung’. ASRock calls this capability ‘DDR4 Non-Z OC’.

The other specifications of the Hyper boards are the same as those of ASRock’s Fatal1ty H170 Gaming K4 and Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4 motherboards. They are midrange boards with, among other things, two PCI-e 3.0 x16 interfaces, six USB 3.0 ports and a Killer E2400 gigabit Ethernet connection. ASRock reports that the two products will not be available in all countries. It is not known in what and what the official suggested retail prices are. The Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4 Hyper can be found at German and Austrian webshops for prices from 120 to 150 euros.