Conclusion

In this article we've had a closer look at what effect overclocking an Intel Core i7-6700K to 4.5 GHz has regarding gaming performance. Default this CPU clocks at 4.2GHz and therefore bumping the frequencies to 4.5 GHz makes for an overclocking of 7.14%. On average - over all different resolutions - this accounts for a 2.28% performance bump. This means that the difference is actually measurable but since the scaling is not linear (7.14% clock boost doesn't mean 7.14% performance boost) you really don't have to expect miracles from overclocking your CPU.

What's been pretty interesting to observe is tha fact, that Battlefield 4 responds pretty well to overclocking your CPU. Using our 1080p preset we see a 13% jump in performance. This is actually surprising, keeping in mind we only overclocked the CPU by a bit more than 7%. In all other games, there is virtually no performance difference measurable. The Battlefield 4 result actually puts a bit of a bias in our overall results since it's basically a statistical outlier.

Apart from the performance benefits overclocking your CPU means your system will burn more power. If you keep things like Intels Turbo active, then the CPU will downclock, when there is no load and the CPU will also change the voltage to a lower value. This results in good energy efficiency. For these test we simply bumped the multiplier to 45 and we didn't change any other parameter, leaving the motherboard and CPU in control of changing voltages. In idle the power consumption overclocked and stock are identical, since the CPU is being downclocked and driven at a lower voltage automatically. On the other hand when the CPU is running at 4.5 GHz the voltage shoots up from 1.36V to 1.44V - in the case of our CPU. In the end it's especially the voltage, which makes for a higher power consumption. Comparing the results we see that the system with the running stock clocks burns 206 Watt, whereas the overclocked setup pulls 254 Watts from the plug - 23 percent difference. Overall it's fairly safe to say, that overclocking your Skylake CPU will require come some more juice from the plug.

Apparently overclocking is fun, but when it comes to the plain facts regarding gaming performance, we see that there is almost no difference apart from increased power consumption.