Building a Computer with Skylake Processors: A Detailed Guide

To kind of keep an eye on things I was just using C bench in order to run through it and kind of validate very quickly if everything was stable fortunately most of my instability came upon boot up when I actually did boot into the operating system I haven't had any issues with instability so far uh going through a single run of Center bench is not necessarily a full like load burn in test I would want to take something like Prime 95 and run it overnight to make sure everything was nice and stable but by and large if you can get through a center bench Center bench run you're probably going to be okay down here though.

You can see uh what kind of performance increase I got at least with CER bench um by doing my overclock so at the bottom is the Baseline score of 548 that's right here and that's running at def frequency and then I have several other i56500 tests that you can see right here this is the 4.22 GHz overclock right here I know cinam bench doesn't show that but trust me it is uh we got up to 689 points and that was an increase of about 26% overall um when comparing the uh overclock speed to the non-overclock speed pretty nice I would say but um ultimately I'm still left a little bit torn I guess um I what I wanted to do with this entire project was come to you guys and say Here's list of parts here's a computer you can put together here's a few fairly simple steps you can take to get yourself up and running and get yourself more bang for the buck that's what it's always about more for your money um it's a little bit more complicated than I had hoped it's definitely not like crazy complicated like if we go back to you know overclocking in the 90s or anything like that but there are some quirks and some things that just make it a little bit less accessible for somebody especially who has never built a computer before what I think this video warrants is another follow-up video with some additional testing so that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to split this into another part uh what I want to do next is first get that 6600k installed in here and see how I'm uh testing and scoring uh compared to that I want to run some more benchmarks apart from cinam mench I want to do some gaming tests and see what kind of actual gaming improvements we're getting uh also comparing to the 6600k and just kind of show like if you want to go this route it's a little bit more Niche it takes a little bit more effort after the f you got to do a little bit of tweaking and tuning with the overclocking overclocking is always you know a variable as well you never know exactly what you're going to get I got to 4.2 here pretty stably a lot of other people who I've been reading articles for online have hit 4.4 and above but it depends on how much voltage you're willing to drop into it depends on your cooling solution I'm using a very uh uh effective but also budget oriented cooling solution here so all of those things kind of play a part anyway though.

I'm going to follow this video up I promise next week with some more testing some more benchmarking so let me know in the comment section down below what uh if anything in particular you would like me to test out on this rig if you have any other suggestions for things you want to see me do with this configuration to give you guys some better ideas of what you can do when it comes to uh getting those less expensive Skylake processors and overclocking them last thing I wanted to point out is that I went with the 6500 but a lot of the uh a lot of the actual benchmarks and other tests I've seen going on on online in the past month or so have said a 6400 might be a better bet I like both of those processors because they're actual quad cores and they're the cheapest full quad cores you can get in the sky lineup so I might even go for 6400 and see how that goes maybe just kind of see if I get a better luck of the draw when it comes to the kind of overclocks I'm able to achieve anyway though guys I know I've rambled a lot in this video but uh I get excited about this stuff there's lots of to test there's lots of potential there's lots of variables to account for so again let me know in the comment section down below what you think I should be doing for the follow-up for this video thanks so much for watching this one hit the like button too while you're at it if you enjoyed this video uh subscribe to my channel for more stuff just like this and we'll see you next time

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enexcellent what's up guys how's it going today's video is going to be all about overclocking non overclockable Intel processors specifically Skylake processors and if you're wondering how that's done well uh first off you need a z170 motherboard similar to this one this is a z170 extreme 4 which I'm going to use to demo overclocking well not this CPU this is a 6600k this one is unlocked so you could easily do a multiplier overclock on this what I want to get is something that gives us a little more bang for our buck hopefully something that's still a quad core something that still will make for a very nice gaming system for that I'm going to go for an i56500 but I don't have one so let's go to Micro Center glorious Micro Center see if they're playing any of Jay's videos again 6600 K 6100 there's the 6500 that's weird oh they they have the retail pricing on them right yeah they have retail pricing on okay that's why such a big healthy stack of hyper 212 evos I might as well get one success what's in the bag I managed to get away with just six oh God it's bright out here I uh showed great self-restraint and I only came out with that hyper 212 and the 6500 uh that should be all I need for today okay I managed to make it back I I got my 6500 got my z170 extreme 4 from azrock out of the box here I was just taking a look I figured Let's uh go over this really quickly before I move on azrock actually sent this motherboard over directly um so that I could use it to demonstrate the bclk overclocking with nonk Intel Skylight processors so thank you azrock for that uh I also wanted to point out that azrock is not the only one with this capability uh Asus super micro were two of the other sort of Originators along those those were the three kind of first to sort of bring this to the Forefront I don't know who was absolutely first but I heard it first from azrock so put it that way uh MSI and uh EVGA have also followed suit and I believe gigabyte will be as well so pretty much all of the motherboard manufacturers are able to enable this simply by giving you a bios update for the motherboard now there's a couple things to point out here one is that the BIOS update is not typically available directly via this standard ways you go like you know go to the motherboard web page on AZ Rock's website go to the download find your bios and download it you've got to download it from a special place that's because it does a couple things to the motherboard and I want to point those out before I dive into this one is that it's going to disable turbo and States for your processor um which isn't a huge deal to a lot of people who only care about how fast is it and and that kind of thing but if power uh consumption is a concern of yours it's definitely something to keep in mind one probably more important thing to keep in mind is that this is going to disable the igpu when you load up that bios so you're going to need a discrete graphics card you're not going to be able to use the igpu along with this overclocking method that said here is a look at the board and uh the z170 extreme 4 is uh part of the extreme Series so it's definitely not quite as budget oriented as like their Pro Line is um although this is more of a budget Series so the extreme series had there's like a three a four a seven there's a six and a 7 um this one goes for about $145 uh us as of the time of this video and there was also a $20 mail in rebate so down to $125 after that mail and rebate so you can get this fairly inexpensive uh you do have a couple uh by6 PCI Express slots right there so you can do two-way GPU configurations they're triple slot spaced I thought that was kind of nice it's got a pretty much all black look um there's some copper accents on some of the heat sink or not the heat sinks but this little shroud right here this is a plastic shroud by the way uh it has a purity sound logo on it and then uh the rest of the heat sinks are made of metal but they're fairly minimalist I mean fairly you know they're not too Gody or anything like that so you can see that sort of shinier azrock logo again with the copper uh color and then there's a gold caps also kind of scattered across the board uh looking at the upper Edge we can see the uh vrm heat sinks that are at the top right here and this was actually part of the reason why I chose this board I wanted something that wasn't crazy expensive I definitely didn't want a top-of-the-line $200 $250 plus overclocking board but the power delivery is important when it comes to sky likee z170 or Skylake uh processors and overclocking so this has a 10 phase power delivery these are nichon 12K gold caps in there as well and uh definitely not the best when it comes to overclocking but certainly better than a lot of the more Bare Bones Say $100 and less the 170 options that are out there you also of course have h four Ram slots which is pretty nice to have and then there's some other kind of little bonus features like you got a power and reset surface mounted right there you've got a debug LED was which is nice to have uh SATA Express on all these which I are they making SATA Express drives I feel like they must have given up on that you also have an ultra m.2 Port right there uh PCI Express gen 3x4 uh which is definitely very nice to have it's not in my favorite position since it's right below the primary graphics card slot so that will be blocked by your GPU uh actually very much of a concern if you're considering water cooling with is boort but there's probably not a whole lot of people considering that lastly here's the io and hey a PS2 Port I don't mind that uh it's a combo Port 2 uh you got six USB 3.0 ports here here and here and here uh you also have all the connectors for your igpu including a fullsize display port and HDMI uh you've got your integrated Nick right there which is I believe Intel based and uh then you also have your 5.1 surround audio then they've added on a USB 3.1 controller there and they're giving you a type c connector as well as a type a connector uh and USB 3.1 it's nice it's super fast I think that is quite enough talking for now though let me uh get this all put together and then I will start overclocking so as test setups go everything came together pretty easily here uh got the hyper 212 installed on top of the 6500 uh I've got the memory video card storage in place and uh I actually spent a couple hours last night uh going through just messing around with stuff and uh trying out the overclocking capabilities of this configuration uh so yeah full disclosure it is Friday morning now um but I am happy to say that I was able to overclock my 6,500k I settled in on just over 4.2 GHz uh for the overclock um but let me quickly give you a closer look at this setup before I move on so here's the flip side and I'm coming over here to memory you uh will see that I have gskill this is Rip Jaws 5 and this is 3200 speed rated memory I'm not running it at 3200 but I want a memory that was fast enough to keep up with um some potential weird overclocking numbers it might be thrown at it since we are doing BCL bclk adjustment which is going to affect uh the CPU frequency as well as the memory frequency although fortunately not much else for graphics card I just dropped in a 980 TI that's cuz it was sitting there to my rights and it was available I know I'm matching some high-end Hardware up here with this guys but this is really just for purely for testing and and and overclocking purposes 980 TI is there though and then the plexor m6e is sitting in there just below it for our main operating system lastly just so you guys can see what I'm doing I have this HDMI cable going out of my graphics card and into my Elgato game capture hd60 and then that's being captured by my capture system and that is how I'm able to uh well see what's going on on this screen over here then also see and capture stuff over there which I'm showing you guys too much behind the scenes stuff right now let's uh anyway though we're in the operating system and uh let me just show you guys the default specs for the 6500 so up here i56500 uh core voltage is going to be jumping around because right now all those little uh power saving functions are still in place cor speed is going to be jumping a little bit uh it's going up to like 3.4 and then it's resting down when it's idling and that sort of stuff at a lower frequency um I did notice that the bus speed is a little bit higher than than it should be it's at 10083 which is why we're seeing some slightly weirder numbers here but ultimately what you have here is a core speed of 3200 MHz and then um this processor will automatically overclock itself depending on how many cores are being used so we'll go up to 3.6 on a single core if it's using two cores it'll go up to 3.5 if it's using three cores it'll go to 3.4 and if it's using all four cores it'll only do 3.3 so only 100 MHz boost over what was there before um you can see that also reflected over here on hardware monitor where we can see the V cor for example at 1.84 note here that apart from the voltages we can also see all of our core temperatures and then um as we move a little bit further down here we can see the actual clock speed so this has been topping out again uh on a single core at 3.6 GHz or so um but that it's also underclocking itself down to 800 when it is Idle okay next up I need to restart and show you guys what's going on in the bios so as I've been going through all the overclocking I've made use of a couple features of this motherboard one is the fact that there is a dual bios switch right there so I just switched back over to my overclock setting uh the other thing that I was making use of is the clear seos uh which is actually a button over here on this side um when I would start an overclock and then I would get a hang or it would stop responding or whatever uh I would basically hold down the power switch until the system shut off then I would turn off the power on the power supply over here hit the power again to flush all the power that's out of the system and then flip everything back on and then generally it would start up again if that wasn't working which only happened one or twice as I was trying some more outlandish things then I would do all that and with the power SWAT Supply turned off hold in the clear seos button for about 5 Seconds that clears everything and resets it back to default on the BIOS that you're set to and then you can kind of go back and and key in your your overclocks again fortunately I didn't really have to do that more than once or twice but I was getting some pretty frequent uh lockups when it comes to attempting higher overclocks I was going for 4.4 4.5 and this processor wasn't really able to hit it bear that in mind when you're overclocking CPUs it's it's a shot in the dark how far your CPU might be able to overclock some of them do better some of them do worse this one happened to do pretty decently I think but anyway on a typical startup I would uh reset oh gosh I didn't hit that clear seam no I didn't the hell's going on that was weird Okay so on a tickal start start up I'd reboot and then as it's booting up you tap delete and that's how you get into the BIOS uh so here's the the BIOS from azrock um they have a graphical layout you can use your mouse to navigate around and you'll notice here in the top left the version I'm using is 2.61 um that's not currently available directly from the the azrock website it's available in the beta download section or you can find Direct downloads for certain places they're actually only on 2.4 right now but thanks to ASRock for pre-loading this bios up for me I thought that was nice anyway apart from that we can get our first glance at stuff like the dam that's installed and what it's running at and if the XMP profiles on what storage is in there I have the fan set to silence uh now which is actually pretty nice and quiet and I'm happy to announce that that was actually functional um when I was running some tests on this just now all right so we're going to go into advanced mode and that's how you do the overclock in here again we see a layout of kind of uh what the motherboard is and CPU and all that good stuff OC tweaker is where where we're going to be doing our OC tweaking and here up at the top you can see the settings that I went for so I I finished on 4.22 me uh GHz um there's also the cach speed which also ramps up my uh base clock or bclk speed is 1 131.8 75 and I did that so that 4220 would be a nice round number memories running at just over 2,800 so uh let me just kind of run through and show you guys what I did uh first off I went to dram and um I was initially playing with XMP settings what you should do probably is go in here uh tell it to use XMP settings but then which I can do right here there's a profile one uh I'm not going to mess with it right now but once you tell it to do XMP settings it's going to try to set your Dam frequency in the case of this memory to 3200 I didn't want to do that um so after it was set you can go in here specifically and tell it what frequency you want to run at I'd recommend sticking between 2133 and maybe 2600 is or so um I was able to uh be pretty stable at 2800 so that's what I went with um but this is kind of where I would start out after you've done that go back and then we will go into the voltage configuration voltage is one of those things that you just need more of if you're looking at overclocking one of these uh lower-end CPUs uh simply put you're going to be increasing the TDP theoretically um you're going to be generating more heat uh in order to do that you need to tell it give me more voltage I'm at 1.35 right now although I was messing with 1325 1325 for Sandy Bridge processors is a good starting at Point uh you might range up to 1.3 35 1.36 1.37 if you notice in your operating system as you're running Benchmark tests and putting a load on the system that you're hitting 1.4 or above I dial it back you probably don't want to sit at one at over 1.4 volts with these CPUs and uh also bear in mind with voltage I'm specifically talking about uh the skyl CPUs here because voltage tolerances tend to vary a bit um from CPU to CPU anyway set it to fix mode instead of Auto or offset and tell it well 1.35 in this situation but um I would say start off with 1. 325 and then only add a little bit more um if you need it finally the CPU configuration and here is where the uh rubber meets the road or so to speak um and again I'm not doing a whole lot of uh advanced settings in here I'm pretty much mainly just messing with the bclk frequency and here I started off at well I did 110 first and then I was like that's boring uh and then I went to 120 and then I went to 130 at 130 I was stable try to go 140 which um what do what does 140 even do if I key it in here 140 gives us almost a 4.5 GHz overclock as you can see up here 4.48 um but that was not stable so I ended up dialing it back and um I've just completely lost the number I even had set in there that's okay the nice thing about this is uh you can use a plus and minus to actually adjust so I'm just going to hold minus down to roll ourselves back down to four what was it 4.22 yeah and that'll get us all the way back down here um now one last thing you should do before you restart and load into your operating system and see if it's stable uh is double check your target memory speed it's going to be reflected here and uh if this is too high or if it's higher than you'd want it to go again just jump back over to dram configuration use a dam frequency uh drop down here and uh set it manually to what you want it to be at once you've done all that hit F10 save and exit it'll restart go back into the operating system and uh you should be all set to go now now again this this is very much a your mileage may vary situation when it comes to what motherboard you're using I'm using an azero motherboard if you're doing this on an MSI or a gigabyte or an Asus or an EVGA the interface is going to look different some of the the labelings of things might look a little bit different but the basic stuff I talked about as far as bclk uh and as far as what else uh the memory as far as all the all those labels should be roughly the same so you should be able to figure out what's going on okay so we're back in uh windows so this is Windows 8 and uh as you can see or hopefully as you can see we have a successful overclock let me zoom in ah ah okay um so on cpz you can see the bus speed is at 131.8 is uh core speed is at about 4220 and you know it's going to fluctuate here and there just a little bit U multiplies at 32 so here's where you can see maybe more directly the difference between overclocking via bus speed and overclocking via multiplier overclocking via multiplier is what you would do if you had like a 6600 K or one of the K SKS that was unlocked multiplier overclocking is simply taking a bus speed of which usually usually is 100 granted you can do both but usually the bus speed's 100 times your multiplier so multiplier of 44 for example with a bus speed of 100 would be 4.4 GHz or 4,400 MHz for the overclock in this case we're leaving the multiplier locked because it is locked and we can't touch it which is in this case at 32 and bear that in mind when you're overclocking it's going to be when bclk overclocking it's going to be uh adjusting that based on the uh base multiplier of the CPU not the turbo multiplier so taking a best speed of 131 * 32 gives us our overall overclock of 4220 is um we also of course are working on four cores and four threads so let me point out some of the other quirks though of this overclocking method because I will say there was a few of them that um I don't know they were funny I I was hoping I wouldn't have to deal with quirks but anyway here's our V cor which is at 1.34 actually just slightly below the 1.35 that we set it to so that's cool um also we can see system temperatures but if we scroll down there is no actual temperature listings on our i56500 here we can see oh sorry it's jumpy it's jumpy we can see voltages we can see poers clocks utilizations but we can't see the temperature it's weird it's weird when overclocking I kind of got used to it it's a little bit bit more like overclocking in the dark often when you're overclocking you want to you want to take a look at your temperature cuz when you see like hey I'm hitting 90 95° C that's too hot so this was a little bit stranger since you can't see the temperature of your CPU and that's just one of the things that goes along with this overclocking method since it's not really like fully Intel sanctioned um I didn't run into too many issues as far as I could tell I'm sitting here right next to it and I I have a general idea based on past experience like how hot like a heat sink's getting based on the CPU and these CPUs are lower tdps uh overall which means chances are they're not going to get that hot but something to to bear in mind also notice here for our clocks uh the uh what they are at right now is this column this is the lowest and this is the highest so you'll notice the turbo boost is not taking effect we have 4215 and 4220 for our minimum and Max clock speed so it's always going to be running at uh that higher frequency um as far as power consumption that's means that you're going to use more power but um it's not the end of the world uh for sure and uh but again just one of those little quirks and something to keep in mind when you're doing this uh after I got booted up into the operating system after dialing in my overclock loading up CPU Z and a little bit of hardware monitor to kind of keep an eye on things I was just using C bench in order to run through it and kind of validate very quickly if everything was stable fortunately most of my instability came a upon boot up when I actually did boot into the operating system I haven't had any issues with instability so far uh going through a single run of Center bench is not necessarily a full like load burn in test I would want to take something like Prime 95 and run it overnight to make sure everything was nice and stable but by and large if you can get through a center bench Center bench run you're probably going to be okay down here though you can see uh what kind of performance increase I got at least with CER bench um by doing my overclock so at the bottom is the Baseline score of 548 that's right here and that's running at def frequency and then I have several other i56500 tests that you can see right here this is the 4.22 GHz overclock right here I know cinam bench doesn't show that but trust me it is uh we got up to 689 points and that was an increase of about 26% overall um when comparing the uh overclock speed to the non- overclock speed pretty nice I would say but um ultimately I'm still left a little bit torn I guess um I what I wanted to do with this entire project was come to you guys and say Here's list of parts here's a computer you can put together here's a few fairly simple steps you can take to get yourself up and running and get yourself more bang for the buck that's what it's always about more for your money um it's a little bit more complicated than I had hoped it's definitely not like crazy complicated like if we go back to you know overclocking in the 90s or anything like that but there are some quirks and some things that just make it a little bit less accessible for somebody especially who has never built a computer before what I think this video warrants is another follow-up video with some additional testing so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to split this into another part uh what I want to do next is first get that 6600k installed in here and see how I'm uh testing and scoring uh compared to that I want to run some more benchmarks apart from cinam mench I want to do some gaming tests and see what kind of actual gaming improvements we're getting uh also comparing to the 6600k and just kind of show like if you want to go this route uh it's a little bit more Niche it takes a little bit more effort after the f you got to do a little bit of tweaking and tuning with the overclocking overclocking is always you know a variable as well you never know exactly what you're going to get I got to 4.2 here pretty stably a lot of other people who I've been reading articles for online have hit 4.4 and above but it depends on how much voltage you're willing to drop into it depends on your cooling solution I'm using a very uh uh effective but also budget oriented cooling solution here so all of those things kind of play a part anyway though uh I'm going to follow this video up I promise next week with some more testing some more benchmarking so let me know in the comment section down below what uh if anything in particular you would like me to test out on this rig if you have any other suggestions for things you want to see me do with this configuration to give you guys some better ideas of what you can do when it comes to uh getting those less expensive Skylake processors and overclocking them last thing I wanted to point out is that I went with the 6500 but a lot of the uh a lot of the actual benchmarks and other tests I've seen going on on online in the past month or so have said a 6400 might be a better bet I like both of those processors because they're actual quad cores and they're the cheapest full quad cores you can get in the sky lineup so I might even go for 6400 and see how that goes maybe just kind of see if I get a better luck of the draw when it comes to the kind of overclocks I'm able to achieve anyway though guys I know I've rambled a lot in this video but uh I get excited about this stuff there's lots of to test there's lots of potential there's lots of variables to account for so again let me know in the comment section down below what you think I should be doing for the followup for this video thanks so much for watching this one hit the like button too while you're at it if you enjoyed this video uh subscribe to my channel for more stuff just like this and we'll see you next timeexcellent what's up guys how's it going today's video is going to be all about overclocking non overclockable Intel processors specifically Skylake processors and if you're wondering how that's done well uh first off you need a z170 motherboard similar to this one this is a z170 extreme 4 which I'm going to use to demo overclocking well not this CPU this is a 6600k this one is unlocked so you could easily do a multiplier overclock on this what I want to get is something that gives us a little more bang for our buck hopefully something that's still a quad core something that still will make for a very nice gaming system for that I'm going to go for an i56500 but I don't have one so let's go to Micro Center glorious Micro Center see if they're playing any of Jay's videos again 6600 K 6100 there's the 6500 that's weird oh they they have the retail pricing on them right yeah they have retail pricing on okay that's why such a big healthy stack of hyper 212 evos I might as well get one success what's in the bag I managed to get away with just six oh God it's bright out here I uh showed great self-restraint and I only came out with that hyper 212 and the 6500 uh that should be all I need for today okay I managed to make it back I I got my 6500 got my z170 extreme 4 from azrock out of the box here I was just taking a look I figured Let's uh go over this really quickly before I move on azrock actually sent this motherboard over directly um so that I could use it to demonstrate the bclk overclocking with nonk Intel Skylight processors so thank you azrock for that uh I also wanted to point out that azrock is not the only one with this capability uh Asus super micro were two of the other sort of Originators along those those were the three kind of first to sort of bring this to the Forefront I don't know who was absolutely first but I heard it first from azrock so put it that way uh MSI and uh EVGA have also followed suit and I believe gigabyte will be as well so pretty much all of the motherboard manufacturers are able to enable this simply by giving you a bios update for the motherboard now there's a couple things to point out here one is that the BIOS update is not typically available directly via this standard ways you go like you know go to the motherboard web page on AZ Rock's website go to the download find your bios and download it you've got to download it from a special place that's because it does a couple things to the motherboard and I want to point those out before I dive into this one is that it's going to disable turbo and States for your processor um which isn't a huge deal to a lot of people who only care about how fast is it and and that kind of thing but if power uh consumption is a concern of yours it's definitely something to keep in mind one probably more important thing to keep in mind is that this is going to disable the igpu when you load up that bios so you're going to need a discrete graphics card you're not going to be able to use the igpu along with this overclocking method that said here is a look at the board and uh the z170 extreme 4 is uh part of the extreme Series so it's definitely not quite as budget oriented as like their Pro Line is um although this is more of a budget Series so the extreme series had there's like a three a four a seven there's a six and a 7 um this one goes for about $145 uh us as of the time of this video and there was also a $20 mail in rebate so down to $125 after that mail and rebate so you can get this fairly inexpensive uh you do have a couple uh by6 PCI Express slots right there so you can do two-way GPU configurations they're triple slot spaced I thought that was kind of nice it's got a pretty much all black look um there's some copper accents on some of the heat sink or not the heat sinks but this little shroud right here this is a plastic shroud by the way uh it has a purity sound logo on it and then uh the rest of the heat sinks are made of metal but they're fairly minimalist I mean fairly you know they're not too Gody or anything like that so you can see that sort of shinier azrock logo again with the copper uh color and then there's a gold caps also kind of scattered across the board uh looking at the upper Edge we can see the uh vrm heat sinks that are at the top right here and this was actually part of the reason why I chose this board I wanted something that wasn't crazy expensive I definitely didn't want a top-of-the-line $200 $250 plus overclocking board but the power delivery is important when it comes to sky likee z170 or Skylake uh processors and overclocking so this has a 10 phase power delivery these are nichon 12K gold caps in there as well and uh definitely not the best when it comes to overclocking but certainly better than a lot of the more Bare Bones Say $100 and less the 170 options that are out there you also of course have h four Ram slots which is pretty nice to have and then there's some other kind of little bonus features like you got a power and reset surface mounted right there you've got a debug LED was which is nice to have uh SATA Express on all these which I are they making SATA Express drives I feel like they must have given up on that you also have an ultra m.2 Port right there uh PCI Express gen 3x4 uh which is definitely very nice to have it's not in my favorite position since it's right below the primary graphics card slot so that will be blocked by your GPU uh actually very much of a concern if you're considering water cooling with is boort but there's probably not a whole lot of people considering that lastly here's the io and hey a PS2 Port I don't mind that uh it's a combo Port 2 uh you got six USB 3.0 ports here here and here and here uh you also have all the connectors for your igpu including a fullsize display port and HDMI uh you've got your integrated Nick right there which is I believe Intel based and uh then you also have your 5.1 surround audio then they've added on a USB 3.1 controller there and they're giving you a type c connector as well as a type a connector uh and USB 3.1 it's nice it's super fast I think that is quite enough talking for now though let me uh get this all put together and then I will start overclocking so as test setups go everything came together pretty easily here uh got the hyper 212 installed on top of the 6500 uh I've got the memory video card storage in place and uh I actually spent a couple hours last night uh going through just messing around with stuff and uh trying out the overclocking capabilities of this configuration uh so yeah full disclosure it is Friday morning now um but I am happy to say that I was able to overclock my 6,500k I settled in on just over 4.2 GHz uh for the overclock um but let me quickly give you a closer look at this setup before I move on so here's the flip side and I'm coming over here to memory you uh will see that I have gskill this is Rip Jaws 5 and this is 3200 speed rated memory I'm not running it at 3200 but I want a memory that was fast enough to keep up with um some potential weird overclocking numbers it might be thrown at it since we are doing BCL bclk adjustment which is going to affect uh the CPU frequency as well as the memory frequency although fortunately not much else for graphics card I just dropped in a 980 TI that's cuz it was sitting there to my rights and it was available I know I'm matching some high-end Hardware up here with this guys but this is really just for purely for testing and and and overclocking purposes 980 TI is there though and then the plexor m6e is sitting in there just below it for our main operating system lastly just so you guys can see what I'm doing I have this HDMI cable going out of my graphics card and into my Elgato game capture hd60 and then that's being captured by my capture system and that is how I'm able to uh well see what's going on on this screen over here then also see and capture stuff over there which I'm showing you guys too much behind the scenes stuff right now let's uh anyway though we're in the operating system and uh let me just show you guys the default specs for the 6500 so up here i56500 uh core voltage is going to be jumping around because right now all those little uh power saving functions are still in place cor speed is going to be jumping a little bit uh it's going up to like 3.4 and then it's resting down when it's idling and that sort of stuff at a lower frequency um I did notice that the bus speed is a little bit higher than than it should be it's at 10083 which is why we're seeing some slightly weirder numbers here but ultimately what you have here is a core speed of 3200 MHz and then um this processor will automatically overclock itself depending on how many cores are being used so we'll go up to 3.6 on a single core if it's using two cores it'll go up to 3.5 if it's using three cores it'll go to 3.4 and if it's using all four cores it'll only do 3.3 so only 100 MHz boost over what was there before um you can see that also reflected over here on hardware monitor where we can see the V cor for example at 1.84 note here that apart from the voltages we can also see all of our core temperatures and then um as we move a little bit further down here we can see the actual clock speed so this has been topping out again uh on a single core at 3.6 GHz or so um but that it's also underclocking itself down to 800 when it is Idle okay next up I need to restart and show you guys what's going on in the bios so as I've been going through all the overclocking I've made use of a couple features of this motherboard one is the fact that there is a dual bios switch right there so I just switched back over to my overclock setting uh the other thing that I was making use of is the clear seos uh which is actually a button over here on this side um when I would start an overclock and then I would get a hang or it would stop responding or whatever uh I would basically hold down the power switch until the system shut off then I would turn off the power on the power supply over here hit the power again to flush all the power that's out of the system and then flip everything back on and then generally it would start up again if that wasn't working which only happened one or twice as I was trying some more outlandish things then I would do all that and with the power SWAT Supply turned off hold in the clear seos button for about 5 Seconds that clears everything and resets it back to default on the BIOS that you're set to and then you can kind of go back and and key in your your overclocks again fortunately I didn't really have to do that more than once or twice but I was getting some pretty frequent uh lockups when it comes to attempting higher overclocks I was going for 4.4 4.5 and this processor wasn't really able to hit it bear that in mind when you're overclocking CPUs it's it's a shot in the dark how far your CPU might be able to overclock some of them do better some of them do worse this one happened to do pretty decently I think but anyway on a typical startup I would uh reset oh gosh I didn't hit that clear seam no I didn't the hell's going on that was weird Okay so on a tickal start start up I'd reboot and then as it's booting up you tap delete and that's how you get into the BIOS uh so here's the the BIOS from azrock um they have a graphical layout you can use your mouse to navigate around and you'll notice here in the top left the version I'm using is 2.61 um that's not currently available directly from the the azrock website it's available in the beta download section or you can find Direct downloads for certain places they're actually only on 2.4 right now but thanks to ASRock for pre-loading this bios up for me I thought that was nice anyway apart from that we can get our first glance at stuff like the dam that's installed and what it's running at and if the XMP profiles on what storage is in there I have the fan set to silence uh now which is actually pretty nice and quiet and I'm happy to announce that that was actually functional um when I was running some tests on this just now all right so we're going to go into advanced mode and that's how you do the overclock in here again we see a layout of kind of uh what the motherboard is and CPU and all that good stuff OC tweaker is where where we're going to be doing our OC tweaking and here up at the top you can see the settings that I went for so I I finished on 4.22 me uh GHz um there's also the cach speed which also ramps up my uh base clock or bclk speed is 1 131.8 75 and I did that so that 4220 would be a nice round number memories running at just over 2,800 so uh let me just kind of run through and show you guys what I did uh first off I went to dram and um I was initially playing with XMP settings what you should do probably is go in here uh tell it to use XMP settings but then which I can do right here there's a profile one uh I'm not going to mess with it right now but once you tell it to do XMP settings it's going to try to set your Dam frequency in the case of this memory to 3200 I didn't want to do that um so after it was set you can go in here specifically and tell it what frequency you want to run at I'd recommend sticking between 2133 and maybe 2600 is or so um I was able to uh be pretty stable at 2800 so that's what I went with um but this is kind of where I would start out after you've done that go back and then we will go into the voltage configuration voltage is one of those things that you just need more of if you're looking at overclocking one of these uh lower-end CPUs uh simply put you're going to be increasing the TDP theoretically um you're going to be generating more heat uh in order to do that you need to tell it give me more voltage I'm at 1.35 right now although I was messing with 1325 1325 for Sandy Bridge processors is a good starting at Point uh you might range up to 1.3 35 1.36 1.37 if you notice in your operating system as you're running Benchmark tests and putting a load on the system that you're hitting 1.4 or above I dial it back you probably don't want to sit at one at over 1.4 volts with these CPUs and uh also bear in mind with voltage I'm specifically talking about uh the skyl CPUs here because voltage tolerances tend to vary a bit um from CPU to CPU anyway set it to fix mode instead of Auto or offset and tell it well 1.35 in this situation but um I would say start off with 1. 325 and then only add a little bit more um if you need it finally the CPU configuration and here is where the uh rubber meets the road or so to speak um and again I'm not doing a whole lot of uh advanced settings in here I'm pretty much mainly just messing with the bclk frequency and here I started off at well I did 110 first and then I was like that's boring uh and then I went to 120 and then I went to 130 at 130 I was stable try to go 140 which um what do what does 140 even do if I key it in here 140 gives us almost a 4.5 GHz overclock as you can see up here 4.48 um but that was not stable so I ended up dialing it back and um I've just completely lost the number I even had set in there that's okay the nice thing about this is uh you can use a plus and minus to actually adjust so I'm just going to hold minus down to roll ourselves back down to four what was it 4.22 yeah and that'll get us all the way back down here um now one last thing you should do before you restart and load into your operating system and see if it's stable uh is double check your target memory speed it's going to be reflected here and uh if this is too high or if it's higher than you'd want it to go again just jump back over to dram configuration use a dam frequency uh drop down here and uh set it manually to what you want it to be at once you've done all that hit F10 save and exit it'll restart go back into the operating system and uh you should be all set to go now now again this this is very much a your mileage may vary situation when it comes to what motherboard you're using I'm using an azero motherboard if you're doing this on an MSI or a gigabyte or an Asus or an EVGA the interface is going to look different some of the the labelings of things might look a little bit different but the basic stuff I talked about as far as bclk uh and as far as what else uh the memory as far as all the all those labels should be roughly the same so you should be able to figure out what's going on okay so we're back in uh windows so this is Windows 8 and uh as you can see or hopefully as you can see we have a successful overclock let me zoom in ah ah okay um so on cpz you can see the bus speed is at 131.8 is uh core speed is at about 4220 and you know it's going to fluctuate here and there just a little bit U multiplies at 32 so here's where you can see maybe more directly the difference between overclocking via bus speed and overclocking via multiplier overclocking via multiplier is what you would do if you had like a 6600 K or one of the K SKS that was unlocked multiplier overclocking is simply taking a bus speed of which usually usually is 100 granted you can do both but usually the bus speed's 100 times your multiplier so multiplier of 44 for example with a bus speed of 100 would be 4.4 GHz or 4,400 MHz for the overclock in this case we're leaving the multiplier locked because it is locked and we can't touch it which is in this case at 32 and bear that in mind when you're overclocking it's going to be when bclk overclocking it's going to be uh adjusting that based on the uh base multiplier of the CPU not the turbo multiplier so taking a best speed of 131 * 32 gives us our overall overclock of 4220 is um we also of course are working on four cores and four threads so let me point out some of the other quirks though of this overclocking method because I will say there was a few of them that um I don't know they were funny I I was hoping I wouldn't have to deal with quirks but anyway here's our V cor which is at 1.34 actually just slightly below the 1.35 that we set it to so that's cool um also we can see system temperatures but if we scroll down there is no actual temperature listings on our i56500 here we can see oh sorry it's jumpy it's jumpy we can see voltages we can see poers clocks utilizations but we can't see the temperature it's weird it's weird when overclocking I kind of got used to it it's a little bit bit more like overclocking in the dark often when you're overclocking you want to you want to take a look at your temperature cuz when you see like hey I'm hitting 90 95° C that's too hot so this was a little bit stranger since you can't see the temperature of your CPU and that's just one of the things that goes along with this overclocking method since it's not really like fully Intel sanctioned um I didn't run into too many issues as far as I could tell I'm sitting here right next to it and I I have a general idea based on past experience like how hot like a heat sink's getting based on the CPU and these CPUs are lower tdps uh overall which means chances are they're not going to get that hot but something to to bear in mind also notice here for our clocks uh the uh what they are at right now is this column this is the lowest and this is the highest so you'll notice the turbo boost is not taking effect we have 4215 and 4220 for our minimum and Max clock speed so it's always going to be running at uh that higher frequency um as far as power consumption that's means that you're going to use more power but um it's not the end of the world uh for sure and uh but again just one of those little quirks and something to keep in mind when you're doing this uh after I got booted up into the operating system after dialing in my overclock loading up CPU Z and a little bit of hardware monitor to kind of keep an eye on things I was just using C bench in order to run through it and kind of validate very quickly if everything was stable fortunately most of my instability came a upon boot up when I actually did boot into the operating system I haven't had any issues with instability so far uh going through a single run of Center bench is not necessarily a full like load burn in test I would want to take something like Prime 95 and run it overnight to make sure everything was nice and stable but by and large if you can get through a center bench Center bench run you're probably going to be okay down here though you can see uh what kind of performance increase I got at least with CER bench um by doing my overclock so at the bottom is the Baseline score of 548 that's right here and that's running at def frequency and then I have several other i56500 tests that you can see right here this is the 4.22 GHz overclock right here I know cinam bench doesn't show that but trust me it is uh we got up to 689 points and that was an increase of about 26% overall um when comparing the uh overclock speed to the non- overclock speed pretty nice I would say but um ultimately I'm still left a little bit torn I guess um I what I wanted to do with this entire project was come to you guys and say Here's list of parts here's a computer you can put together here's a few fairly simple steps you can take to get yourself up and running and get yourself more bang for the buck that's what it's always about more for your money um it's a little bit more complicated than I had hoped it's definitely not like crazy complicated like if we go back to you know overclocking in the 90s or anything like that but there are some quirks and some things that just make it a little bit less accessible for somebody especially who has never built a computer before what I think this video warrants is another follow-up video with some additional testing so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to split this into another part uh what I want to do next is first get that 6600k installed in here and see how I'm uh testing and scoring uh compared to that I want to run some more benchmarks apart from cinam mench I want to do some gaming tests and see what kind of actual gaming improvements we're getting uh also comparing to the 6600k and just kind of show like if you want to go this route uh it's a little bit more Niche it takes a little bit more effort after the f you got to do a little bit of tweaking and tuning with the overclocking overclocking is always you know a variable as well you never know exactly what you're going to get I got to 4.2 here pretty stably a lot of other people who I've been reading articles for online have hit 4.4 and above but it depends on how much voltage you're willing to drop into it depends on your cooling solution I'm using a very uh uh effective but also budget oriented cooling solution here so all of those things kind of play a part anyway though uh I'm going to follow this video up I promise next week with some more testing some more benchmarking so let me know in the comment section down below what uh if anything in particular you would like me to test out on this rig if you have any other suggestions for things you want to see me do with this configuration to give you guys some better ideas of what you can do when it comes to uh getting those less expensive Skylake processors and overclocking them last thing I wanted to point out is that I went with the 6500 but a lot of the uh a lot of the actual benchmarks and other tests I've seen going on on online in the past month or so have said a 6400 might be a better bet I like both of those processors because they're actual quad cores and they're the cheapest full quad cores you can get in the sky lineup so I might even go for 6400 and see how that goes maybe just kind of see if I get a better luck of the draw when it comes to the kind of overclocks I'm able to achieve anyway though guys I know I've rambled a lot in this video but uh I get excited about this stuff there's lots of to test there's lots of potential there's lots of variables to account for so again let me know in the comment section down below what you think I should be doing for the followup for this video thanks so much for watching this one hit the like button too while you're at it if you enjoyed this video uh subscribe to my channel for more stuff just like this and we'll see you next time\n"