Whilst the H55M-LE isn't considered a motherboard with overclocking as its primary objective it doesn't hurt to try to ascertain how far this board will go with regards to performance overclocking. Afterall, coming in at a lower price-tag the H55 chipset and Core i5/i7 offerings could provide some 'bang for buck' - allowing us to push it up to a configuration that at stock would cost much more.
For this overclocking exercise, I simply disabled some of the settings in CPU Configuration and applied a 'Manual' modification within the BIOS. I then began notching the BCLK up. CPU voltages were set at 1.4v, VTT 1.35v and I made sure the DRAM frequency and voltage was below stock parameters (so that we don't head into instability).
I spent what seemed like an entire day altering BIOS settings to try to squeeze out of the Intel Core i7 875K as much bus frequency as possible. But I soon realised that I was at the very peak of overclocking performance when I hit 3.74GHz. Prior to getting to the concluding result via overclocking I had tried many different combinations of CPU voltage, VTT and multiplier but I seemed to hit a wall at 3.74GHz.
The settings for the overclock where:
CPU Voltage 1.4v
DRAM Voltage 1.65v
VTT Voltage 1.36v
BCLK 150
Multiplier 25
Whilst this overclock isn't especially phenomenal, it is conservative and shows that there is some headroom for overclocking. The great thing about the Intel Core i7 875K that was used is that it has unlocked multipliers so any combination could and was tried.
Test Setup
CPU Intel Core i7 875K (2.93GHz)
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn Matterhorn
Motherboard ASRock H55M-LE
Memory 4GB Mushkin EM3-10666 DDR3
Graphics XFX HD5870
HDD 250GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA-II
PSU OCZ Fatal1ty 750W
To understand how well the ASRock H55M-LE performs the below benchmarks will be conducted, both at stock CPU speed (2.93GHz) and the above overclocked speed of 3.74GHz.
Testing Suite
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Everest Ultimate
Cinebench
3DMark Vantage x64
SiSoftware SANDRA 2009
Unreal Tournament 3
