ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard

Overclocking

Select 2nd Gen Core family processors delimited with a ‘K’ in the product identification are unlocked meaning the multiplier can be adjusted to change the overall CPU speed. Basically CPU speed = CPU Ratio (or multiplier) times Base clock frequency (or BCLK). Although the BCLK is able to adjust -/+ 10% it is best practice to leave it at the default and specified 100MHz. This is where the Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard shines. Overclocking is so simple and the stability is fantastic.  Simply enter the UEFI bios at start up and select from the preset ‘Turbo modes’  to provide a 1 click overclock of the system!  I played around with the settings manually and found it almost impossible to beat the performance and stability of the overclock achieved by the ASRock built-in presets. Now the system is overclocked to 4.8Ghz stable using the ‘Turbo 4.8’ settings provided in the UEFI bios.

This was the highest stable and reliably boot-able speed I was able to attain in testing. The CPU averaged about 47C/117F doing basic word processing and web browsing. With further tweaking and adjusting advanced voltages it may be possible to push the CPU further but in order to finish up the overclocking portion of the  review and not cause permanent damage to the CPU or motherboard I decided to stop at 4.8GHz or 45% overclock… Not too shabby!

AIDA64 v1.50.1230

CPU Queen – 2nd; up from 5th @ 4.0Ghz OC’d	CPU PhotoWorxx – 1st; 11% increase from 4.0Ghz OC’d
CPU ZLib – 3rd; up from 4th @ 4.0Ghz OC’d	CPU AES – 1st; squeezed another 2% from 4.0GHz OC’d
CPU Hash – 6th; up from 7th @ 4.0Ghz OC’d Total 41% increase in speed compared to stock 3.3Ghz, only surpassed by 6, 8, or 12 core CPUs

Visual indicators of performance increase mean more than I can tell you, take a look at those numbers!  The motherboard is more than capable at these speeds and every application or game I opened ran for well over an hour without any issues.

PCMark Vantage x64

How the test was setup to run	Results – 21538 Marks

21% increase overall from 3.3 GHz stock. I didn’t buy a 4.8Ghz CPU, but the unlocked nature of the processor and the rock solid overclocking abilities of this motherboard allow the CPU to happily run at 4.8Ghz

PerformanceTest v7.0

PassMark Rating- 3468.2 4.0 GHz OC’d = 2988.3 [+16%]	CPU Rating – 9882.6 4.0 GHz OC’d = 8287.8 [+19%]
	Comparison Stock 3.3 GHz & Overclock 4.0 Ghz & Overclock 4.8 Ghz

Further proof of the 2nd Gen unlocked processor potential that can be harvested with a solid P67 chipset and adequate air cooling.

SiSoftware Sandra 2011c

The more detailed views provided by Sandra show the performance increases in every aspect of the system.

Processor Arithmetic
Processor Multi-Media
Multi-Core Efficiency
Power Management Efficiency
Cryptography

The ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard is more than capable of any overclocking.  I pushed the system as hard as booting windows would allow.  The stability and performance increase obtained with such a simply implemented overclock process is awesome.

For a more detailed look at the performance of the Intel Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge CPU see our full review here

Time to wrap things up…

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