Intel Alder Lake processors are getting more and more attractive

The Intel Alder Lake processors of the Core i3 and Core i5 series already turned out to be very attractive based on the ratio of performance and price compared to AMD Ryzen CPUs, and now another argument has been found in favor of these processors, and a weighty one: as it turned out, even “non-overclockable” models without index K can be overclocked. And in the case of the potential hit Core i5-12400, overclocking is fully justified, since you can count on a free performance increase of about a third. True, for this, at hand, you need to have a suitable motherboard.

The well-known overclocker Der8auer reported that ordinary 65-watt Alder Lake without the K index can be overclocked. He noticed that Asus motherboards based on the Z690 chipset (in particular, ROG Maximus and APEX) have the ability to change the BCLK frequency. Moreover, it works only in conjunction with a conventional processor, without the K index in the title.

According to the overclocker, the BCLK OC function is implemented in Asus Z690 APEX and Z690 HERO motherboards with BIOS version 0811. But, for example, it does not work in the same ROG Strix Z690-I. Der8auer suggests that BCLK OC is currently (and will be available) only on top-of-the-line Z690 models with a separate (external) clock generator.


How the overclocking of ordinary Alder Lake takes place, the overclocker demonstrates on the video. It should only be noted that in the case of Alder Lake, bus overclocking does not affect the operation of peripherals, for example, devices connected via the PCIe bus, so this is not only a fairly simple, but generally safe method. This, however, is accompanied by an increase in the core voltage, an increase in temperature, and an increase in power consumption - this must be taken into account when choosing a cooling system for an overclocked CPU.


As for the performance increase, it is, and, in the case of the Core i5-12400, it is noticeable. The CPU ran at 5.2 GHz with all six active cores. Its maximum frequency in the base, recall, is 4.4 GHz. This naturally led to an increase in performance both in benchmarks and in games. The overclocker also overclocked the Core i5-12600, but the result is already more modest here - performance increased by 16%.

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