Man Vs. Machine: Four Automatic Overclocking Techs, Compared

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Targeting inexperienced tuners with easy-to-use buttons, several motherboard vendors now provide one-touch overclocking technologies that take away the guesswork. We examine the ease, effectiveness, and safety of methods provided by four major brands.

Benchmark Results: Crysis

Crysis is a handy real-world benchmark because it shows performance differences for nearly every hardware change. These are most noticeable at lower settings, such as 1280x720 with anti-aliasing disabled.

ASRock’s higher-frequency “Turbo 4.6” mode puts it ahead of Asus in “Auto” mode, while Gigabyte’s slightly higher DRAM data rate edges out Asus with manual overclocking. The P8Z68 Deluxe looks good in the balance.

Performance differences between motherboards are minimized at increased GPU resolutions. Even the mighty GeForce GTX 580 bottlenecks Crysis!

CPU clock takes precedence at our higher-quality Crysis settings, yet even that variable goes away when resolutions are pushed to 1920x1080 or higher.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.