“Competitive overclocking, isn’t
easy. It’s quite involved and
rather challenging.”
edge. This is what overclocking
has always been and always will
be. It isn’t a unique property of
overclocking, but a property of
every single competitive endeavour
humans undertake.
Right now, virtually everyone
knows what B-die is. They’ve heard
about it, read about it or at some
level interacted with someone
talking about it, yet few are able
to appreciate what it is about this
IC that makes it special. There’s
nothing that necessitates that
one knows the specifics about
the signal tolerances of the ICs.
However, those who push it to the
edge can tell you if the particular
ICs you have are a good, average
or poor bin. There’s no way for you
to know that if all you’re solely
concerned with game FPS counters.
There’s no way for you to know if
16 The OverClocker Issue 41 | 2017
all you do is load the X.M.P profile.
More directly, if you take any two
kits that are rated identically, one
using B-die and the other XFR for
instance, you may even find the
kit based on the B-die ICs offering
slightly lower performance. Again,
nothing you can appreciate if all
you’re concerned about is gaming
performance. However, with some
tuning, the Samsung IC kit will go a
lot farther and deliver performance
that the XFR kit cannot, regardless
of what you do. How regular PC DIY
fans became familiar with these ICs
is purely as a result of overclockers.
The same holds true for HCH9,
D9GTR, D9GMH, TCCD, BH6/BH5
and going back even before that.
Now I’ve spent so much time
talking about memory because for
the most part, this is where
motherboards cut their mustard.
This is where the rubber meets the
road. It’s not in the LED, not in the
audio solution or NIC controller. It’s
right here where the Z170M-OC
FORMULA earned its stripes first,
and solidified itself with LN2 cooling.
Within these disciplines is where
the APEX and Extreme boards will
shine. Here is where the Champion
board would prove itself.
Every time an overclocker sent
an email to their vendor contact
reporting that this particular thing is
not working, that this part behaves
erratically, this doesn’t actually
change the register here and there
and so much more, that info is then
poured back into future products
It’s poured back into future CPUs
and components. It’s a relationship
and discourse that ultimately
results in the boards that PC DIY