ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 Motherboard Review

Overclocking
One thing that I really like about the second-generation Intel Core processor platforms is that they make overclocking very simple.  You are able to overclock the system a few different ways.  You can use the ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility in Windows as we pointed out on the previous page.

ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 Motherboard

I went ahead  in to the BIOS and decided to do my overclocking from there.  As I said overclocking is very simple.  I first set the CPU ratio to 40 to get the system up to 4GHz, that was simple and the system had to problem booting at 4GHz.  I kept on moving up in 100MHz intervals till the system would not boot, that was at 4.7GHz.  So I started to move down till I found a stable overclock.  A stable overclock to us is a system that passed both the Prime 95 1 hour benchmark and completes a run of PCMark Vantage.  Our stable overclock was 4.4GHz, which is not bad, but I’ve had my Core i5-2500K all the way up to 4.7GHz on a P67 system.

ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 Motherboard ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 Motherboard

One thing I found sort of frustrating when overclocking the system was that if the system would not boot it would sort of just sit there, nothing on the screen, no message saying the OC was unsuccessful, nothing.  So I would have to reset the CMOS every time this happened and go in and reload all of my settings.

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