To overclock, we reduced the multiplier from 48 to 44 – this gives us some room to work inside our limitations of 4.8ghz.
We increased the BLCK/PEG frequency to 109, and set the memory to 2,180mhz in the ASUS bios. We experienced some instability so loosened the timings to 10-11-10-36 which doesn't have an overly negative effect on the results. We found this was stable. Our final clock speed was 4796mhz – very close to the 4,800mhz figure used earlier in the review.
We could push to 2,400mhz but the timings needed loosened further to 11-12-11, this lowered the scores and gave worse benchmark results.
System validation at these speeds is available over here.
The overclock helped improve the time by 2 seconds, to 5 minutes and 11 seconds.
The overclock helps generate another 3GB/s of memory bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra. A score of 27GB/s+ for a dual channel configuration is extremely impressive.
The increased memory speed helps to improve copy, read and write results – by a noticeable margin too. The final scores are very impressive, aided by the still tight timings.