TweakTown's Ultimate Intel Skylake Overclocking Guide

The Board

The ASRock Z170 OC Formula has a long legacy, and their Z170 OC Formula is easy to work with. I used this motherboard for memory testing in this guide.

ASRock's OC buttons are very useful for on-the-fly overclocking. If you would like a more in-depth look at the board, the review is here. One unique feature of the Z170 OC Formula is its ability to change VCore on-the-fly through "Rapid OC" buttons, which work off a software OSD and menu button.

LLC Performance

ASRock's LLC is quite aggressive.

BIOS Special OC Profiles

Here are some special profiles for extreme overclocking for the CPU, there are also "Optimized OC Setting" which are more tailored towards normal overclocks that use air/water cooling.

ASRock also provides a large number of extreme memory overclocking profiles for different types of memory.

BIOS Power Savings

ASRock's EIST and Turbo are located in their OC Tweaker area, but C States are located under CPU Configuration. I would not disable EIST or C-States to maintain constant maximum CPU clock in-Windows; instead, I would go to the control panel and change the power plan to "High Performance".

BIOS PWM Options

ASRock does provide PWM options to expand PWM switching frequency, phase control, and overcurrent protection (OCP). You can try expanding these if you do more extreme overclocking, but I didn't find any reason to adjust them. In fact, ASRock's UEFi is set to automatically adjust these by itself.

OC Software

ASRock's Rapid OC provides functionality for the Menu, Plus, and Minus buttons on the motherboard. With the software installed and in the background you can increase and decrease CPU ratio, cache ratio, and VCore on-the-fly with the buttons. ASRock also provides other overclocking settings through their Formula Drive software. ASRock's Timings Configurator provides memory timing information.