EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Review

EVGA Z68 FTW Overclocking

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

Overclocking with the new Sandy Bridge processors has been simplified, at least in part. Adjustments to the Bclck have been almost done away with and overclocking is almost completely done through increasing the multiplier. When overclocking we used to run out of room on the Bclk or cooling. Now we are going to be limited by the Multi-wall. The Sandy Bridge processor just isn’t capable of going any faster; it’s all dependent on the piece of silicon that you get when you purchase your processor.

The Intel Core i7 2600K utilizes a Bclk of 100MHz, under full load the Intel Core i7 2600K uses a multiplier of x34 to achieve the final clock speed of 3.4GHz. Since we are using a K series processor which has an unlocked multiplier we will be able to increase the default x34 multiplier to achieve our overclock today. We can see in the above CPUz 1.59 screen shot that with the Turbo mode engaged we are cruising along at 3.8GHz.

After a short period inside the EVGA Z68 FTW UEFI BIOS we were able to hit a rock solid overclock of 4789.7MHz. We only had to tweak a couple of settings in the EVGA Z68 FTW UEFI BIOS to hit our overclock. We increased the multiplier to x48 and the voltage to 1.450 Volts.

We also eliminated the VDroop and enabled the Internal PLL Voltage Override. All of the other settings in the EVGA Z68 FTW UEFI BIOS were left on auto.