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It's safe to say that we've been highly impressed with Intel's Skylake line of processors - architectural advantages along with higher memory bandwidth are producing big gains over established processors. There's just one problem. The best Skylake chips - the overclockable Core i5 6600K and Core i7 6700K - have availability issues, meaning that prices have skyrocketed. However, that may change now that every Skylake chip is overclockable on select motherboards, and the results can be extraordinary. Is this an actual Christmas miracle?It all kicked off when motherboard manufacturer Supermicro announced the arrival of a new BIOS for its products, allowing for overclocking on previous locked chips. This was quickly followed by Asrock, who generously provided us with a Z170 Pro4S board for testing. MSI quickly followed suit, allowing us to upgrade the MSI Gaming Z170A Gaming M5 we have in the office. Very quickly, we had our Core i3 4130 running at 4.44GHz, and buoyed by this result, we purchased a Core i5 6500 quad-core chip and managed to push it to 4.5GHz up from its stock 3.2GHz clock-speed. This is hardcore.
Before we go any further, we have to lay out some ground rules here. First of all, there's a general understanding that Intel grades its CPUs and saves the best for the unlocked K chips, but even there, it's widely understood that some processors overclock better than others. It's what's referred to as the silicon lottery, so the results you see here may not be guaranteed for your - or any other - chip. Secondly, there's every chance that Intel will lock out this unofficial overclock in future with microcode updates, nerfing this feature if you update your motherboard BIOS. Thirdly, overclocking a locked Skylake processor disables the onboard GPU, meaning a discrete graphics card is required. Not that this is a problem for gamers, of course.
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