Overclock Intel i5-2500k on ASRock P67 Extreme4 Gen3

[Paandu]

Built a brand new computer using Intel i5-2500k and ASRock P67 Extreme4 Gen3 motherboard. The system specs are as follows:

1. ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) Motherboard
2. Intel i5-2500K Quad-Core Processor
3. CORSAIR CPU Cooler
4. CORSAIR 750W PSU
5. CORSAIR 8GB (4x2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1333 SDRAM
6. Radeon HD 6870 Graphics Card

I would like to do overclocking since the processor contains an unlocked multiplier. But many people reported that this configuration is not suitable for overclocking since many people experienced problem with High overclock. The people who tried to do 4.5ghz usually ran into problems. Is that true?

[Mr.Ryszard]

It is easy for you to overclock the Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge by altering the multiplier. You don’t need to struggle with BCLK. BCLK stays at 100MH but the multiplier can be modified in any manner. Once you have the 100MHz on the BCLK and 40 for the multiplier it won’t be a problem for you to get the 4GHz output from the processor. Overclocking is really simplified with Sandy Bridge, you have to modify the CPU voltage and multiplier accordingly. The ultimate achievement was 5GHz on air cooling but do not try it unless you have a good cooling mechanism inside your PC. You can start modifying the voltage at the beginning but stop when it hits 1.45v. Do not go above that. It is a stable point. This overclocking was achieved on the ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) Motherboard without any issues. 5GHz was attainable with 1.45v and it was impressive.

[FullTimepass]

AS far as I know that in this motherboard you can get the voltage settings in BIOS which you can tweak in any manner to get the stable overclocking. If you don’t find a proper value or setup, you can try with some software like ThrottleStop or SetFSB. They are quite easy in terms of overclocking. It seems to be this is the first time you are digging into overclocking. For this processor, the maximum safe voltage is 1.52V but if your system does not have watercooling then you have to stick with 1.45V. Take a control over the temps and make sure that they are not going high. While you continue to push your processor, you have to keep an eye on the temps at a real time so that nothing goes out of bound.

[Tikoo]

For stable overclocking you should leave the voltage on auto. Whenever you encounter any problem, you should start increasing the vcore voltage. Read some guides regarding it. Do not go up the cpu's limit. In this motherboard the issue is having due to VTT/VCCSA bus which is kinda strange. Try raising your VTT and VCCSA voltage slightly. Next thing you can try out is disable load line calibration. It also helps you sometime.

[Akaashath]

Whenever you go for overclocking the i5 processor, check what the Loadline Calibration is set to. If you have set to 1.28V manually, the motherboard will not be able to give enough voltage under load whenever you have Auto LLC. Actually the default settings are depending upon the motherboard. You should try manual settings like little above or little less or little more and see what happens actually, once the processor started running fine on Auto at 4.4, it would be better if you leave it as it is. Actually you won’t notice a big performance difference in 4.4 and 4.6 or 4.8.