ECS P67H2-A LGA 1155 ATX Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

The days of overclocking by simply increasing the BCLK are gone with the new Sandy Bridge processors. Some initial hardware reviews are only seeing single-digit percentage increases in performance by using older overclocking methods. The K series LGA 1155 processors have unlocked CPU multipliers, which seem to be the preferred way to get more performance out of these cores in turbo mode.

The P67H2-A’s BIOS has many standard overclocking options, but unfortunately there aren’t that many things we recommend users change in the BIOS to ensure they see at least a 1GHz or more increase in performance. Here’s what we did to help us get the best overclock possible with the P67H2-A. 

We made the following changes in the BIOS before we started overclocking our i5-2500K processor:

• Left BCLK frequency at 100
  
  
• Increase CPU Ratio (The math for overclocking our i5-2500K is very simple because we just multiply the BCLK frequency (100) and the CPU Ratio (currently 45) to get the overall CPU speed (4.5GHz)
  
  
• Manually adjusted DRAM frequency to DDR3-1600
  
  
• Adjusted DRAM voltage to 1.65v
  

After making the changes above in the BIOS, I began incrementally increasing the CPU ratio to test how far the i5-2500K could go. I started out at 40x as usual, and in true form the i5-2500K was more than capable of handling basic overclocking. I continued to increase the CPU ratio to 44x and finally started seeing the core sweat a bit during stability testing. I increased the VCore to 1.4 volts, which helped me get another clock cycle out of the CPU. At 46x, we began to see the core become unstable during stability testing. After backing it down a bit, we were able to get a stable 4.290GHz overclock.

This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 4.290GHz overclock on the ECS P67H2-A