ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard Review

Overclocking the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

Overclocking with the new Sandy Bridge processors has been simplified, at least in part. Adjustments to the Bclck have been almost done away with and overclocking is almost completely done through increasing the multiplier. When overclocking we used to run out of room on the Bclck or cooling. Now we are going to be limited by the Multi-wall. The Sandy Bridge processor just isn’t capable of going any faster; it’s all dependent on the piece of silicone that you get when you purchase your processor.

The Intel Core i5 2500K utilizes a bus speed of 100MHz, though the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional P67 motherboard is picking it up at 99.8MHz. Under full load the Intel Core i5 2500K uses a multiplier of x33 to achieve the final clock speed of 3.3GHz. Since we are using a K series processor which has an unlocked multiplier we will be able to increase the default x33 multiplier to achieve our overclock today.

The ASRock Fatal1ty Professional P67 motherboard has a few different overclock settings already built into the system BIOS. It is the first option that we say on the system UEFI BIOS page on the OC Tweaker page within the BIOS, Load Optimized CPU Setting. The first settings will bring your CPU to 4.0GHz, that would be a 700MHz boost to an already fast Intel Core i5 2500K. Though fast as 4.0GHz would be, it’s just not enough. The available settings jump in 200MHz increments, starting at 4000MHz and climb all the way up to 4800MHz. I went through each setting and finally ended up at the last one which brought our Intel Core i5 2500K to 4.8GHz!

We were able to bring the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional P67 motherboard and Intel Core i5 2500K to 5.0GHz. This seemed to be a rock solid overclock, though no matter what we did we couldn’t get our ASRock Fatal1ty Professional past a multiplier of x50. All in all though, we are still happy with a solid overclock of 5.0GHz!