that if you’re the ill-defined “gamer” that supposedly seeks a Killer
Ethernet controller and
some form of superior audio solution, you’re just out
of luck this time. You’re not
losing much though as those
LAN controllers rarely if ever
make a difference and most audio is respectable on motherboards of late.
While we are talking about that,
given that we can get a fairly robust
board for $150, it does beg the
question as to why we don’t
get some real innovation
at the $400 level when
$150 options have largely
the same features. That
however is a separate and
inconsequential debate
for what we are concerned
with. What we want to
know is what can one do
armed with a meagre
budget and a desire to
build an overclocking capable system that moonlights
as a gaming rig as well.
To that end, one should
seek out the GIGABYTE
Z170XP-SLI, UD3, ASRock
Z170 Gaming K4, Asus
Z170-A or any similar
motherboard in that
range. You can find a list of
supporting boards here at
Overclocking.Guide.
Breaking the Rules!
What you may know
already is that this Non-K
SKU overclocking was
"supposedly" blocked
by INTEL. It was only a
matter of time and it took
just a couple of months for
it to come to a grinding
halt. That said, there’s
absolutely nothing
preventing you from
partaking in this exercise
still, as all overclocking
support remains present in
previous BIOS versions. In
MSI's case they have
released updated BIOS
files with other fixes and
support.
For other vendor boards
sadly, you
will want to avoid updating to any
of the new BIOS revisions that
came after around or around the
middle of February 2016.
Since this isn’t an overclocking
tutorial, the assumption is you’re
well versed with your way around
the BIOS and even if you’re not,
you’ll eventually figur e it out. It’s
simply a matter of selecting the
right Base clock and memory
multiplier in combination with the
necessary voltages. Tweaking the
system and finding out the best
settings for your particular CPU and
memory combination is the fun part
and as such it will not be detailed
herein. Again if you need that
information and more, head over to
Overclocking.Guide where you’ll get
additional information about all
things overclocking related.
Before undertaking any of this
however you'll want to find out
roughly how much more
performance can be had from
overclocking this CPU. The results
may surprise you.
Worth mentioning is that, the Core
i3-6300 and the 6320
are memory bandwidth starved. In
fact, if you’ve looked at the graphs,
just increasing the memory
frequency yields massive gains in
performance - more so than raising
the clock speed. This isn’t just in the
synthetic tests, but it is made
evident in the game benchmarks as
well. As such you’ll want to look at
extracting the best frequency
possible from your memory kit. We
found that memory timings, while
crucial as always, are of secondary
importance when balanced against
raw frequency (obviously this must
be kept within reason as 19-35-3550-2T is no good). Samsung D/E-die
based memory can be had for a
relatively low sum these days with
kits retailing for as little as $60 and
sometimes less for a dual channel
8GiB kit. In this particular editorial
we made use of the G.Skill Trident Z
3,466MHz 8GiB kit which happens to
be a paltry $59 (At least at the time
of publication). Armed with this kit,
we found a good balance between
frequency and timings, eventually
settling at a modest 14-17-17-30-1T
setting at a comfortable 1.45V. This
is more than a safe voltage and it
should pose no threat to your
memory’s longevity. Of course if
you’re not comfortable with that, you
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