Overclocking non-K Skylake processors may soon be possible

Skylake processors that do not have an unlocked multiplier can soon be overclocked thanks to firmware updates for Skylake motherboards. They are then able to adjust the base clock of the processors without this immediately causing instability.

The news is apparent from the clock speed that professional overclocker Dhenzjhen achieved with a Core i3-6320. He managed to boost the processor to a final speed of 4955MHz using liquid nitrogen. That equates to a 27 percent increase over the standard speed of 3.9GHz. The results were achieved on a Supermicro C7H170-M motherboard with a specially modified firmware. The overclock was achieved by increasing the bclk from 100 to 127.

Anandtech has been in contact with multiple motherboard manufacturers and states that ASRock, Asus and Supermicro are all working on firmware updates for their motherboards to allow overclocking of non-K Skylakes. For example, ASRock could possibly come with firmware updates next week. However, the author does make the comment that it is currently not completely clear what the motherboard manufacturers are doing to enable base clock overclocking and whether this also requires an adjustment on the hardware side.

TechSpot’s testing also shows that the processors don’t consume excessively more power at increased base clock speeds; they tested an i3-6100 that showed a 25% increase in consumption at an overclock of 27%. This can partly be explained by the fact that the integrated GPU has to be switched off before a base clock overclock is possible.

Starting with Skylake, it is in theory possible to overclock the CPU via the base clock, because this clock speed is no longer connected to, for example, the PCI Express bus as with previous generations of Intel processors. As a result, an adjustment of the base clock is less likely to lead to instability in those areas. Nevertheless, until now it was not possible to increase the base clock by more than 4 to 5MHz without still encountering instability.

Normally only the Skylake processors with the ‘K’ suffix are capable of being overclocked. They have an unlocked multiplier that applies to the base clock, which is around 100MHz. Thus, by increasing the multiplier, the effective clock speed of a K-Skylake processor can be increased in steps of approximately 100MHz. However, the K variants of Skylake processors are more expensive than the non-K models and the cheaper Skylake series Pentium and i3 do not contain K variants at all. This development makes it possible to get more performance for less money.

Overclocker ‘Dhenzjhen’ managed to lift an i3-6320 from 3.9GHz to 4.95GHz by increasing the bclk from 100 to 127