ASRock allows overclocking of non-K Skylake CPUs

Remember ASRock’s Sky OC feature? It allowed overclocking the base clock of the non-K Skylake CPUs. After a while, ASRock quietly removed the SkyOC feature via a BIOS update after Intel pressured them to remove the base clock overclocking feature. Users who didn’t update to the latest BIOS can still use Sky OC but ASRock no longer officially supports Sky OC. Fast forward a little bit, and ASRock is back at it again, defying Intel’s directive to stop all overclocking of non-K CPUs. Instead of adding the feature via the BIOS, it now adds a piece of hardware to push the base clocks.

This little piece of silicon is an external base clock generator which will offers a wider range of frequencies and more precise clock waveforms for overclockers to gain more control over their systems. Not much details is offered aside from this, but certain features will be disabled when overclocking is performed on the non-K CPUs. The addition of the chip offers very fine tuning of the base clock in 0.0625 MHz increments.

The motherboards that feature this unique ability are the ASRock Fatal1ty H170 Performance/HYPER and the Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/HYPER. Both boards feature interesting overclocking oriented specifications like 10 phase power delivery system and massive VRM cooling heatsinks. Pricing and availability information is still unknown at the time of writing.

Pokdepinion: I wonder why does ASRock keep bringing overclocking features for non-K CPUs, directly against Intel’s directive. Are they planning on being an AMD-exclusive motherboard vendor? In any case, I respect ASRock’s determination at making overclocking a way to squeeze out more performance from more affordable hardware.