Overclocking and Power Use

There are two approaches to overclocking on the 1155 platform. We can tweak the system within Windows using software from the motherboard manufacturer or we can use the BIOS. For our testing we used the BIOS method and played about with the voltages and multipliers as the Sandy Bridge CPUs are still not particularly flexible on bus changes.

	Stock	Max OC
ASRock Z68 Fatal1ty Gen3	34*100=3400MHz	50*102=5100MHz @1.5v

Using our high end H80 Cooler we were able to hit over 5.1GHz on the ASRock Z68 board, this is essentially the limit of our CPU sample without moving to sub-zero cooling and ensures that the Fatal1ty board competes at the top end of the market.

As a final test for this review we registered the power use of each system at idle and under load to see how the two compare.


Again the ASRock board compares well with the Gigabyte alternative.