ASRock has recently come up with the SKY OC Technology which enables users to overclock locked Skylake processors. PC builders and enthusiasts previously had to resort into using unlocked CPUs in order to have the ability to overclock. Now, locked CPUs and mainly non-Skylake K CPUs, can be overclocked using ASRock’s SKY OC Technology.
This new technology by ASRock may be considered as ground-breaking. This is because, ASRock claims that the SKY OC will enable certain motherboards to overclock any Intel Skylake Processors ranging from the i3, i5 and i7. Interestingly, the ASRock z170 motherboard will also be capable of overlocking non-K pentium CPUs. Bare in mind that currently, the features are currently exclusive to certain motherboards with the Intel Z170 chipset. A Lab test by ASRock determined that even the Intel i5-6400 (once impossible to overclock) was overclocked up to 60% of frequency boost using SKY OC and the ASRock Z170 Pro4 motherboard.
All of this is done with a simple BIOS update that can be obtained from ASRock’s official website. Despite this, there are few trade-offs that needs to be considered if one were to use SKY OC. For example, the onboard integrated Intel graphics GPU will be disabled when using SKY OC, which means that users will have to make sure a dedicated graphics card is already installed beforehand. Besides that, the CPU Turbo Ratio and C-State (a type of power management) will also be disabled.
Since this is a fairly new technology by ASRock, we can expect further improvements and motherboard support inside SKY OC in the future. More details regarding the SKY OC Technology and the current supported motherboards can be found on ASRock’s official website.
(Source: ASRock via TechPowerUp)
