OVERCLOCKING THE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’

It voids your warranty but goes fast... really fast

OVERCLOCKING IS GREAT. Take a chip you know can do better and, with a few tweaks, you’ve made it faster for free. It used to be easy, but the market shifted and chips were sold locked so you couldn’t change the stock settings. But there’s always some wriggle room, especially with specialist motherboards, but to overclock an Alder Lake processor you need an unlocked K-series chip, right?

Apparently not, as overclocker Roman Hartung discovered with his Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex (above) and a regular Core i5-12400. Using the BIOS setting only revealed when you fit a non-K chip, he unlocked the base clock, ramped up the multiplier, tweaked memory speeds and voltages, and made a 4.4GHz chip a 5.2GHz chip, benchmarking about a third faster on Cinebench. Things got even weirder when he tried it out on some lesser chips. A Celeron G6900 was bumped from 3.4GHz to 5.3GHz, while an i3-12100 hit over 5.4GHz on all cores, setting four-core benchmark records in the process.

Which boards support this overclocking is still being figured out, but it’s over half a dozen Asus ROG boards so far. And that is one factor: the board he used cost $720. Some cheaper boards can do this trick, including the ROG Strix B660-G Gaming WiFi, which costs $429. How long will this last? Intel could lean on Asus or it could just take a small hit and make a few people happy. If this sort of overclocking is enabled on more mainstream boards, we can probably expect a response from Intel.

In the meantime, Intel has warned that overclocking could damage the CPU and cause system instability. The experiment highlights one annoyance—owning a processor that has been hobbled to fit a price point. There’s going to be a lot more to come from this story.