Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I have grouped the results into sections here, and all Intel products are tested with 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability. I'll report it here if a board fails to pass one of these tests, I need to increase voltages, or am perhaps allowed to drop voltages.


Overclocking with the ASRock Z87 Extreme6 was quite upsetting, but I only figured out what was wrong by looking at the performance results. Its stock performance numbers were at times pretty low, which I attributed to the default Intel Turbo profile that appeared to be in use. I did update the BIOS a while ago and found that ASRock's own Turbo profile option in the BIOS switched from ENABLED to DISABLED at default, which obviously pleased me personally. So, it made sense for performance to be a bit lower here and there, and that issue would have been of no importance to me, especially since there is an option to enable a boosted Turbo profile, but I checked all of the numbers and looked at my CPU-Z screenshots after I finished my testing, noticing some multi-bounce similar to Intel's default Turbo profile with even the overclock, just with higher multipliers, so numbers here are a bit low because of how the BIOS operates. This does influence the board's power consumption figures negatively as normal power usage with a lower performance will obviously have the board consume more power for a performance similar to that of other boards.

It did occur to me that there might be something wrong with my board. I might have also damaged my CPU in some way during testing or when removing the board's VRM cooling for the pictures. That said, the ASRock Z78's performance can currently, based on the observations I made and the results I collected, only be described as poor. The good news is that its poor performance can easily be fixed with a BIOS update if I am correct, or that the Turbo-boosting option in the BIOS is at fault here. Either way, I felt it prudent to relay my findings since it is something I ran into with this board and none of the others, even if I broke something. But do keep that in mind when looking at the performance numbers. Something is clearly not always working as it should.

AIDA64

CPU OC Performance

3D-Oriented OC Performance

3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage

3DMark11 and PCMark 07

3DMark

Metro: Last Light

Sniper Elite V2

Shogun 2

F1 2010