Overclocking
Though TurboV is good, I get my satisfaction by overclocking the good ol’ way…in the BIOS. LGA 1156 makes for some of the easiest overclocking ever, you can get pretty much all the overclocking you need by raising the BCLK and the CPU voltage. Oh, there are some other tweaks like enabling Load-Line Calibration that I always use, but it is very basic.
I have to mention again how pleasurable the Target Frequency is to use. As you raise the BCKL, the display shows the resulting CPU clock.
Don’t misunderstand me…this isn’t MY idea. Most Asus boards that I received in the past possessed this feature, but this is the first Asus board I have received in many months with it. In defense of Asus…most companies have never had it and still don’t.
The P7H55D-M allows for sync or unsync of the CPU and GPU. I did not want to raise the GPU clock, and disabling sync was short work.
I settled on an overclock of 4.28gHz, a 28.5% overclock. Everything was plenty stable and I could have gone farther, but I just received this CPU and I always like to get comfortable with a processor before trying to get the max overclock. Besides, I feel that the primary use of the Core i5 661 is for HTPC rigs and non-gaming rigs, and most of them will not be overclocked.
