Today is an amazing day for overclocking as one very clever guy who goes by the short name of DJ, or his alias of ‘DHENZJHEN’ has figured out what is required to remove the BCLK limitation on the locked down Intel Skylake CPUs. How the mod works is not yet known, but he has proven that it works by smashing three benchmarks in the dual core categories into pieces and claiming a hefty haul of points for himself.

More details are bound to emerge on the modification required, but for now, it is most likely a very closely guarded secret that he is going to enjoy for himself for a little while longer. I for one, being a very keen overclocker myself, am very interested to see what is required for the mod to work. We’ve speculated that the modification involves fooling the motherboard into believing that it is an unlocked CPU by shorting one or more components to allow for the external clock generator to be activated, which is locked by Intel’s design to prevent overclocking on non-K SKUs.

Given that the Skylake architecture is so much newer than what was previously used to set the records, it is no wonder that the clocks required are far, far lower. DJ has only shown us 120 BCLK, but there’s no reason why he can’t go into the 200 range, as the BCLK generator is external with the introduction of Skylake, and it doesn’t tie into other clock ranges such as PCI-E frequency for example. In theory, 6 GHz or more is possible, but we will have to wait to see how this one develops.

For now, here are a few of the results which he smashed. I’m just waiting on his XTU score to see what this does for the benchmark results. I reckon it’s going to be absolutely humongous, so keep your eyes wide open and anticipate a record smashing barrage from DJ very shortly.

Cinebench – R11.5 – 1st place – 5.85 pts

Cinebench – R15 – 1st place – 520 CB

Geekbench3 – 1st place – 10751 points

As more details crop up, I will update this post and give it a try for myself when I get the chance. Fingers crossed it isn’t just on a SuperMicro board, but on all motherboards!

UPDATE:

We’ve recently learned that the wire that is soldered on to the back of the motherboard has absolutely no relevance to the BCLK alterations. What it is, is in fact a voltage read point for the CPU. It turns out that the motherboard itself is entirely responsible for the BCLK adjustments and therefore it should be a simple BIOS tweak for all manufacturers to be able to unlock such a frequency. However, this is without a doubt something Intel had not intended, so Supermicro may be in trouble here. We will have to see what they decide.