Overclocking the Z270GTN

The BIOSTAR Z270GTN doesn’t come with any auto-overclocking utilities, which is a little disappointing since as companies like ASUS and MSI have demonstrated, these auto-overclockers have gotten good enough to extract most of the performance that the installed processor and cooling system can handle, which is a real win for those daunted by the prospect of manual overclocking.

Still, the O.N.E. section of the Z270GTN BIOS will let you tweak clocks and voltages as you please, so let’s do it old-school. Using the same Sky Lake Core i7-6700K processor and Thermalright SIlver Arrow air cooler we used in our review of the MSI Z170 Gaming 7 motherboard, I initially tried an all-cores multiplier of 46 at the same 1.32V VCORE I used with the MSI motherboard. That crashed in the AIDA64 stress test almost instantly.

After some more tweaking I settled on a voltage of 1.38V:

…which gave me the same stable results at 4.6gHz on all cores:

(For some reason, CPU-Z is not showing the correct core voltage for this motherboard, although AIDA64 did…)

Even going to 1.4V was not enough to eke any more (reliable) speed out of this CPU, so I think 4.6gHz is this processor’s maximum. At an ambient temperature of 19 degrees Celsius, the CPU temperature after 10 minutes of AIDA64 stress testing was only 64 degrees.

In the next section I’ll present my final thoughts and conclusion.