ASRock Releases Bios Updates For Overclocking Non-K Skylake CPUs

ASRock has released BIOS updates that allow overclocking non-K Skylake CPUs by increasing the baseclock. For the time being, there are only bios updates for motherboards with Z170 chipset, the integrated GPU must also be disabled.

The Taiwanese manufacturer ASRock calls the function to overclock Skylake CPUs without a K suffix SkyOC and announces the necessary firmware updates on its website. For now, the feature is only available on the manufacturer’s Z170 motherboards, but ASRock says there will be “more presents sooner or later.”

There are a number of limitations when overclocking the base clock. For example, the integrated GPU of the processor is switched off and the turbo ratio and c-state no longer work. ASRock shows on its SkyOC page, where the bios updates can be found, an image of an Intel Core i5-6400 whose bclk has been increased by 60 percent. The speed went from 2.7GHz to 4.3GHz. That high percentage is probably due to the fairly low regular speed of the i5 CPU in question.

With a Core i3-6100, ASRock achieves a smaller gain of 19 percent. This dual-core, however, is clocked at 3.7GHz by default and taps 4.4GHz with overclock. Overclocking a Core i7-6700 and a Pentium G4400 gave ASRock 32 and 36 percent gains, respectively. In both cases good for a clock speed of more than 4.4GHz. From the images it can be seen that the voltage is set to 1,344v. Details about temperatures or stability of the results obtained are not known.

It is likely that several manufacturers will soon come with bios updates that make it possible to overclock non-K Skylake CPUs. Anandtech has previously been told by Asus and Supermicro that such updates are in the works.