ECS offers overclocking on Intel H87 boards

ECS is the second manufacturer of Intel motherboards that has been able to unlock multiplier overclocking for Intel’s cheaper chipsets (the other being ASRock). Ordinarily one needs a Z87-based motherboard and a K-series processor to adjust the multiplier to facilitate higher overclocks.

Previously ASRock was the only manufacturer exposing controls on their H87 motherboards to get the extra speed boosts that Z87 users would enjoy. You still need a rather expensive K-series chip; Intel has removed the ability to adjust Turbo Boost speeds on cheaper processors as well. Haswell is about as locked-down as you can possibly imagine.

But a bug in the design of the H87, H81 and B85 chipsets has been exploited by ECS as well and they’ve opted to open the option on three motherboards in their lineup.

H81 chipset overclocking

B85 chipset overclocking

H87 chipset overclocking

The degree to which you can overclock varies according to how many VRM phases the board has. The ECS H81H3-A3 is only able to clock up the Core i7-4770K on all cores to 4.5GHz, 600MHz higher than the chip’s default Turbo Boost speed. That gets improved to 4.8GHz on the B85H3-M4 and the H87H3-M4.

The motherboards capable of this are designated by the “H3” in their model name and will be advertised slightly differently. You can also expect them to retail a little higher on the market than their competitors which is a great win for ECS, because this is effectively a BIOS hack anyway. For now, it looks like ASRock and ECS are the brands of choice if you’re on a tight budget and want some overclocking options. This is sure to upset the market when it comes to everyone assembling their buyer’s guides next month.