ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme review - Overclocking

Overclocking on air

As always we tried to overclock the processor. It certainly is doable but proper liquid cooling is recommended. We got the processor stable at 5200 MHz all-core with a vcore of 1.35V~1.45. Not bad at all considering all the cores. 

This resulted in Cinebench in a score of 6631 points, which is an 8 percent higher score than the 6155 points that the processor reaches on stock settings. The heat production was considerable. This processor does have a soldered heatspreader, which in theory should ensure a much better heat transfer compared to thermal interface material.

One thing you do have to take into consideration is that once you overclock, the processor energy consumption jumps up swiftly and fast. But that is the same for any many-core processor from any brand. Once you start to overclock, the heat signature changes rapidly and we're passing a dangerous 90 Degrees. We left things at 5200 MHz to not risk damaging the processor.

Under pure and solely CPU load we now hit close to 360 Watt of power consumption for the entire PC. Despite what you might feel/think, really that's not bad considering all cores run 5200 MHz.