Beginning with the board and chip at stock speeds i decided to try two approaches for the overclock. The first was to let the board do all the work so i used the 'CPU Level Up' and set it to 'Extreme'!

This provided a 3.2ghz clock speed which is around 540mhz over stock.

After a little testing it proved stable so i set about pushing the board manually.

By altering some basic settings (multipler to 21x - bus speed to 190mhz) and upping the CPU's core voltage to 1.33v it rather easily managed 4ghz. After a batch of stability testing i found this to be a good overclock... a 50% overclock straight out of the box. Very impressive!


4ghz CPU-Z.

The Maximus III Gene's power section probably has a lot to do with this clocking performance - it's 8-phase CPU, 2-phase VTT and 2-phase Memory power sections mean it should supply a strong and stable feed of power to the components that need it.

I checked temperatures for each clock and all was fine.


CPU temps at all three clock speeds.

I wonder how these clocks will effect performance.