Overclocking

Two weeks ago my ASRock P55 Deluxe hadn't seen a memory speed exceed 2250MHz DDR. With nothing but some fancy new memory modules and confidence in my testbed, we saw that climb to just over 2350MHz DDR. Not knowing if there was anything left in the tank, it was time to see if the board could achieve 2400MHz.

To say it did it with ease wouldn't be an exaggeration. The memory went in, the BCLK went up, the divider was adjusted, the voltage was set and the timings were set. A reboot out of the bios was done and within a minute we were in Windows. I'm not sure if I was surprised that the memory was able to achieve the speed it was supposed to, or the fact that the ASRock P55 Deluxe worked at the speed, but either way it was a win in my books.

You can see the validation here.

With getting into Windows out of the way, it was time to prime the machine for a bit to double check everything was stable and the great news was that we didn't run into a single problem.

With very little hope for extra MHz from the kit, I did take the time to do a bit of overclocking. We booted at 2500MHz DDR, got into Windows at 2450MHz DDR and were able to launch Prime and run it for about 90 seconds at 2425MHz DDR.

With more voltage and adjusting the timings, we may have been able to get something more stable above 2400MHz DDR, but since we always leave the timings at default and don't move over that 1.65v memory voltage for any kit, we left it as was. Considering out of the box you're already getting 2400MHz DDR, it was simply impossible to feel disappointed in any such way with the kit.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the memory. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.