Locked Intel Core i5-12400 Gets Overclocked To 5.2GHz For A Huge Gain In Performance
Once upon a time, there were two ways to overclock a CPU. Raising the multiplier has been the simplest and easiest option since it came to be, but old hardware nerds like this author will recall the days of raising motherboard front-side bus (FSB) clocks to accelerate memory accesses, as well as goosing the CPU clock rate. That technique more-or-less went away when processors integrated their "FSB" on-die, although modern "base clock OC" has made its return once before, during the Skylake era.
As it happens, that old technique of bus clock-based overclocking has come around once again, this time for Intel's latest 12th-generation Core processors (Alder Lake). Famed overclocker Der8auer was fooling around with a Core i5-12400 slotted into his ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Apex board when he spotted an option that wasn't there before: "Unlock BCLK OC."
We knew something like this would show up; Intel bragged about it at its initial Alder Lake launch. However, BCLK OC options were either absent or much more limited using K-series CPUs. Der8auer notes that no one had been talking about BCLK OC on Alder Lake to this point because when a K-series CPU is installed, the motherboards simply don't present the options.
For any confused novices in the audience, let us explain. Your microprocessor's clock rate is derived by applying a multiplier to a "base clock." For more than a decade, that "base clock" has been 100 MHz. On the Core i5-12400, the maximum multiplier that you can set manually is 40x. The extra 400MHz from Turbo can only be applied to a single core. Since you can't raise the multiplier any further, the only way to overclock these CPUs is to raise that base block.
That's actually been the case for Intel's desktop CPUs as long as it's been using "Core i" nomenclature, but for the most part, you couldn't move the base clock more than a couple of MHz without making the whole system unstable. With Alder Lake, Intel has decoupled the base clock from the rest of the machine so that you can adjust it without affecting anything other than the CPU, its memory, and the ring bus inside the CPU.
The other big catch is that the option to unlock the BCLK is only present on a few motherboards that Der8auer has tested. He posted a second video today where he got some feedback from the community and confirmed that only motherboards that come with an external clock generator are capable of this kind of overclocking. So far, it seems like that list is limited to top-end enthusiast mainboards that cost multiple hundreds of dollars, which makes the prospect of slapping a cheap CPU in them to overclock sort of silly.
Of course, even a 30% overclock won't make up for having less than half the cores, and in multi-threaded workloads—including PUBG—the little Core i5 stands no chance. It holds its own, though, and matches or beats an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X even in multi-threaded work.
