ASRock P55 Deluxe LGA 1156 ATX Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

We’ve had great success overclocking our Intel i7-860 processor with almost every LGA 1156 motherboard we’ve tag-teamed it with so our expectations for the P55 Deluxe were extremely high. The P55 Deluxe comes with a unique BIOS setting to automatically adjust the CPU and memory called the CPU EZ OC and Memory EZ OC options. The CPU OC option allows users to automatically select 3.6 to 4.2GHz and the system will dynamically make all the proper changes to the BIOS to allow the user to keep these overclocked settings. The Memory EZ setting can bump the memory bandwidth up to DDR3 2600, which is more than adquate when you try to hit the 4GHz barrier.

To break from tradition a bit, we wanted to evaluate this board’s “EZ” overclocking features to see if we could actually use the highest settings and see how the board handled the extra load. We were initially able to get the board to 3.8GHz, but when we tried to bump up the CPU EZ OC setting to 4 and 4.2GHz, we immediately noticed heat issues and instability problems. Backing it down to 3.8GHz seemed to be the speed spot on this motherboard. We also ramped up the Memory EZ OC option to DDR3 2000, but it seemed to be more stable at DDR3 1866, especially when we kept the CPU at 3.6and 3.8GHz.

This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 3.8GHz overclock on the ASRock P55 Deluxe