- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,570
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Ok, I know I've mentioned this in CPUs, as to the overclocking results. But I thought that I would post the build here for informative purposes.
ASRock B150 K4/Hyper ATX mobo ($115, mp3superstore on ebay)
Intel G3900 Skylake Celeron dual-core 2.8Ghz CPU ($43, Antonline on ebay)
Intel copper-cored stock 115x heatsink ($10 shipped on ebay)
(2x) 8GB (2x4GB) Geil EVO Potenza DDR4-2400 CAS16 1.2V RAM kit ($33 ea, Newegg on ebay)
EVGA 600W 80Plus PSU ($30, BestBuy on ebay)
DIYpc Solo-T1-BK Blue ATX tower case ($28, Newegg)
Radeon R3 120GB SSD ($34, Newegg on ebay)
AMD Radeon R7 250X 2GB PCI-E video card (~$65?, BestBuy on ebay) (clearance some time ago)
Total: $391
There are cheaper budget motherboards out there, for certain, for building a cheap Skylake Celeron build. And those are fine. But I wanted to overclock!
I had previously, when Skylake was fresh and new, picked up a couple of Z170 Pro4S boards, because they were inexpensive, and supported "SKY OC" (BCLK OC of locked SKL CPUs).
These days, though, ASRock released a series of mobos with "Hyper" in their name, which stands for "Hyper BCLK adjust". They have a separate discrete clock-generator chip, that allows tweaking the BCLK, something that most Z170 boards can do, but required extra engineering to get it to work with B150 and H170, and even possibly with H110 chipsets. (If the H110 / Hyper board ever gets released, that is. Should be a powerful budget solution, coupled with the G3900.)
It went together uneventfully. Note that there a little plastic "corner" piece, that needs to be screwed in to hold the PSU in. (The case is made of very thin metal, and could possibly result in the PSU caving in without this corner piece.)
It does have one single USB3.0 front port, which is helpful. Thanks to that, and my trusty USB3.0 flash drives, I installed Win10 64-bit 1607 in record time on this rig!
I overclocked it at first, with a mild OC, and installed Win10 while OCed (living dangerously, I guess).
Then I downloaded OCCT, CPU-Z, and tweaked further after Windows was installed.
I'm currently at 155.0 BCLK at 1.300V, which works out to 4.34Ghz on the G3900. Not bad, not bad at all. (I tried 160.0 and 162.0 BCLK, at up to 1.375V, but both were unstable with OCCT. Seems like 4.5Ghz is a hard goal to reach, with the lower-binned SKL CPUs.)
According to the built-in benchmark in CPU-Z, this CPU overclocked like this, is FASTER than a Haswell 3.5Ghz i3 CPU. (Whether it has the same quality of performance in games, with only two threads, is probably debatable.)
Edit: I will say that, for a Facebook box, overclocking is unnecessary, and for modern gaming, dual-core is inadequate. So that kind of leaves this sort of build in a kind of limbo, unless you're a Firefox / Waterfox user, in which case it's a great build. (GPU acceleration, fast single-threaded speed.)
If I had to be honest, this is the equivalent of a riced-out Honda Accord or CRX with "fat cans" on the exhaust. Sure, it sounds like a race car, but any real race car would beat it.
Most people would be taken care of quite nicely, with 8GB RAM, an entry-level i3 CPU, and an SSD. Even on a Haswell platform. Although Skylake has its perks.
For greater potency, for gaming, consider upgrading to an i5-6400 or i5-6500, and a GTX1060 6GB or 1070. Then OC the quad-core till it almost cries, then you'll have a worthy budget "SKY OC" gaming rig.
ASRock B150 K4/Hyper ATX mobo ($115, mp3superstore on ebay)
Intel G3900 Skylake Celeron dual-core 2.8Ghz CPU ($43, Antonline on ebay)
Intel copper-cored stock 115x heatsink ($10 shipped on ebay)
(2x) 8GB (2x4GB) Geil EVO Potenza DDR4-2400 CAS16 1.2V RAM kit ($33 ea, Newegg on ebay)
EVGA 600W 80Plus PSU ($30, BestBuy on ebay)
DIYpc Solo-T1-BK Blue ATX tower case ($28, Newegg)
Radeon R3 120GB SSD ($34, Newegg on ebay)
AMD Radeon R7 250X 2GB PCI-E video card (~$65?, BestBuy on ebay) (clearance some time ago)
Total: $391
There are cheaper budget motherboards out there, for certain, for building a cheap Skylake Celeron build. And those are fine. But I wanted to overclock!
I had previously, when Skylake was fresh and new, picked up a couple of Z170 Pro4S boards, because they were inexpensive, and supported "SKY OC" (BCLK OC of locked SKL CPUs).
These days, though, ASRock released a series of mobos with "Hyper" in their name, which stands for "Hyper BCLK adjust". They have a separate discrete clock-generator chip, that allows tweaking the BCLK, something that most Z170 boards can do, but required extra engineering to get it to work with B150 and H170, and even possibly with H110 chipsets. (If the H110 / Hyper board ever gets released, that is. Should be a powerful budget solution, coupled with the G3900.)
It went together uneventfully. Note that there a little plastic "corner" piece, that needs to be screwed in to hold the PSU in. (The case is made of very thin metal, and could possibly result in the PSU caving in without this corner piece.)
It does have one single USB3.0 front port, which is helpful. Thanks to that, and my trusty USB3.0 flash drives, I installed Win10 64-bit 1607 in record time on this rig!
I overclocked it at first, with a mild OC, and installed Win10 while OCed (living dangerously, I guess).
Then I downloaded OCCT, CPU-Z, and tweaked further after Windows was installed.
I'm currently at 155.0 BCLK at 1.300V, which works out to 4.34Ghz on the G3900. Not bad, not bad at all. (I tried 160.0 and 162.0 BCLK, at up to 1.375V, but both were unstable with OCCT. Seems like 4.5Ghz is a hard goal to reach, with the lower-binned SKL CPUs.)
According to the built-in benchmark in CPU-Z, this CPU overclocked like this, is FASTER than a Haswell 3.5Ghz i3 CPU. (Whether it has the same quality of performance in games, with only two threads, is probably debatable.)
Edit: I will say that, for a Facebook box, overclocking is unnecessary, and for modern gaming, dual-core is inadequate. So that kind of leaves this sort of build in a kind of limbo, unless you're a Firefox / Waterfox user, in which case it's a great build. (GPU acceleration, fast single-threaded speed.)
If I had to be honest, this is the equivalent of a riced-out Honda Accord or CRX with "fat cans" on the exhaust. Sure, it sounds like a race car, but any real race car would beat it.
Most people would be taken care of quite nicely, with 8GB RAM, an entry-level i3 CPU, and an SSD. Even on a Haswell platform. Although Skylake has its perks.
For greater potency, for gaming, consider upgrading to an i5-6400 or i5-6500, and a GTX1060 6GB or 1070. Then OC the quad-core till it almost cries, then you'll have a worthy budget "SKY OC" gaming rig.
Last edited:
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