Not long ago, Asrock canceled its plans to produce non-Z170 motherboards with the ability to overclock non-K CPUs with base clock manipulation because of a lack of support from Intel. Now, Asrock is further removing support for overclocking non-K CPUs by removing its Sky OC feature from its Z170 motherboards.
When Sky OC was announced, countless PC enthusiasts were excited about the prospect of being able to overclocking non-K Intel CPUs again, which is something that has not really been possible for the last several years. Sky OC enabled this feature again by using base clock manipulation.
The technology wasn’t perfect. If you raised the system base clock above 100 MHz, you instantly lost the ability to use C-States, Turbo Boost and support for some instruction sets. These were sacrifices that many users were willing to make, though, as enthusiast overclockers that want to get the most performance out of their CPUs typically aren’t concerned with energy efficiency and typically disable power saving features to attain higher clock speeds. Losing Turbo Boost also wasn’t a major problem, as you would get a higher clock speed after you overclocked the system, anyway.
Asrock enabled this feature on numerous Z170 motherboards when it initially announced the feature, but after the latest BIOS update Sky OC has been removed. Users can opt to keep the latest BIOS version that supports Sky OC (version 2.00), but the latest BIOS also includes an update to the CPU’s microcode, which may improve performance and stability. As further BIOS updates come out, this will only push users further away from using the Sky OC feature, essentially killing it off.
We can’t help but wonder what has prompted Asrock to remove this feature, but at this time we don’t have a definite answer. We speculating that it has something to do with an Intel policy. We have reached out to both Intel and Asrock for comments but have not received a reply at this time.
[SOURCE:-tomshardware]