Power consumption and overclocking
These figures show that the Core i5 2500K and Z68 combination are pretty power-frugal. Do remember that a Radeon HD 6950 2GB card sits in the x16 slot. Take it away, run integrated graphics alone and idle power-draw falls to 36W while wPrime's is reduced to just 89W.
Overclocking
We added 10 per cent extra voltage to the CPU and chipset and then overclocked by increasing the multiplier while keeping the base clock at 100MHz - the Core i5 2500K can be overclocked by multiplier jumps alone.
A final, stable speed - characterised by running the wPrime test without failure - of 4.5GHz was achieved. This is 100-200MHz lower than on some other Z68 boards we've previously tested, but seeing as the board's not explicitly geared towards overclocking, the speed is acceptable.
