Locked Skylake CPUs can be overclocked after BIOS update

[HEXUS]

No need to splash your cash on an Intel 'K' series processor.

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[madace]

Sky(is the limit)lake

102.25 BCLK on a watercooled i5-6600 / ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming was never gonna fly. C'mon ASUS make Xmas come early.

[zsde]

didn't we have this before? and it wasn't long before Intel forced the manufacturers to update to a new micro code to prevent exactly this. so lets see for how long these BIOS versions are readily available before the OEM SLAs are enforced, after which all BIOS revisions will include it. So any BIOS updates that are needed will then prohibit it.
Perhaps I may just get myself one just for the fun of it.

[GreMMi]

I have a 6600 coming, interesting! I've never really seen the need to OC that much though. I feel like it's more cost efficient to just get a cheaper rig that gets replaced/upgraded a little bit more frequently. Otherwise I would get a k.

[aniilv]

You could always OC using BCLK. The issue has been that until skylake the bclk clock was tied to many other things. However about 6% increase was possible (106 mhz bclk) and still stable

[zaph0d]

As mentioned above it's only since Sandy that BCLK(FSB) overclocking was severly restricted, funnily enough just as the overclockble K chips came on the market. Huh what a coincidence there.

This is one reason I'm still on my ol' 1366 X58 chipset, albeat with a 6-core Xeon ticking along at 4Ghz quite nicely at intel spec voltage and power saving still enabled. I can push it to 4.65 at 1.45v and no power saving but it's not really worth it. Single thread performance at 4GHz is fine for gaming and with 6 cores and hyperthreads it'll be fine when DX12 games start coming along.

I reckon barring GPU upgrades my system's probably good for another 3-5 years. Not bad for a system that's already 5 years old.

[idris]

@zaph0d - in complete agreement with you..

[canopus72]

Will fail-lake bend and break under the pressure of overclocking?. Wouldn't want to stress it too much since the cpu coolers have already broken the poor little ol' intel camel's back......