Shootouts

Intel P67 Shootout - The Top Guns

By Vincent Chang - 28 Mar 2011

Overclocking

Overclocking

Since we're talking about some of the top, enthusiast boards using the Intel P67 chipset, it would be criminal not to test their overclocking capabilities. Our Core i7-2600K was used for this purpose. To streamline the process, we only focused on getting the highest possible stable CPU frequency by increasing the CPU multiplier, with the base clock untouched at 100MHz. As for the voltage used, we pushed it up when necessary, with a maximum of 1.5V attempted for all the boards. However, not every board could produce a higher clock speed even with higher CPU voltage, so our best overclock results included the corresponding voltage used.

We also tried the auto-overclocking tools that some manufacturers have included in their BIOS. Generally, these tools are a quick way to gauge the amount of overclocking possible, but our best attempt with such utilities resulted in a 4.6GHz overclock, which is some way from the 5.1GHz maximum achievable from manual tweaking.

In the end, all the boards managed at least 4.6GHz, which is a decent bump from the 3.4GHz default on the Core i7-2600K. The best overclocking results were produced by the ASUS and MSI, which both topped out at 5.1GHz. These results were achieved at a very high voltage of 1.48V, which is a risky voltage to sustain in the long term. To be on the safe side, we recommend keeping things at around 1.35V.  We have listed the overclocking results below:

 

Model Maximum Overclock Achieved
Voltage Used
ASRock P67 Extreme6

4.8GHz
(Maximum auto-overclock = 4.6GHz)

1.40V
ASUS Maximus IV Extreme
5.1GHz
(Maximum auto-overclock = 4.6GHz)
1.48V
ECS P67H2-A 4.6GHz 1.38V
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 4.7GHz 1.35V
MSI Big Bang-Marshal 5.1GHz
(OC Genie = 4.2GHz)
1.48V

 

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