Overclocking
Even with the externally-venting graphics card and fairly good front-to-back airflow, the Hyper 612 Ver. 2 CPU cooler couldn’t handle the load of this overclocked Core i7-5820K. Though capable of 4.5 GHz at 1.28 volts, I was forced to drop its core voltage to 1.22 volts due to thermal issues, Noting that it wouldn’t even run all six cores at 4.30 GHz using this voltage, I also applied a 4.0 (six cores) to 4.30 GHz (two cores) scale similar to the Turbo Boost modes used by Intel. Finally, noticing that the CPU bumped its 100 °Celsius thermal limit, I increased that threshold to 105°.
DRAM was far easier to overclock, reaching DDR4-3200 CAS 16-18-18-36 at 1.30 volts. That’s pretty convenient too, since this motherboard lacks any DRAM ratios between the stock DDR4-2666 and the overclocked DDR4-3200.
In a rush to finish, I pushed the GPU graphics RAM to +250 MHz in MSI Afterburner, only to encounter a crash. Dialing each back in 50 MHz increments, I found complete stability at +150 and +200 MHz, respectively. A 106% power limit helps keep the GPU near its maximum boost frequency.
The results under graphics loads are 4.30 GHz CPU, DDR4-3200, a graphics clock up to 1328 MHz, and GDDR5-7412.
