Overclocking
The intrinsic beauty of K-class Sandy Bridge chips lies in the ability to increase the multiplier, and hence speed, without touching the pernickety base clock. Experience has shown that dialling in a 105MHz BCLK causes the system to be as stable as a one-legged man during an earthquake.
ASUS provides various means of increasing the multiplier, but being set in our ways and too old to change them, we took a stroll through the UEFI BIOS and increased the voltage to 1.3V and all-core multiplier until failure set in.
Sandy Bridge chips have shown a propensity for overclocking way past default speeds, so the 4.5GHz all-core frequency, while decent, is well within the remit of our test chip. A 4.6GHz clock-speed very occasionally failed with wPrime, however.
Can you say fast?
