On MSI's Gaming blog we find a nice Skylake Z170 overclocking article posted last week. Martijn Boonstra, product marketing at MSI Europe, took the latest MSI Z170 motherboard for a spin and wrote down his thoughts on overclocking the latest Intel processor architecture. In his article, he compares air, water, and sub-zero cooling results.

The setup he uses consists of the MSI Z170A Gaming M7 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 6700K processor, a set of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory, the MSI GeForce GTX780 Gaming graphics card, and it's all run on a Windows 10 Professional installation. The cooling gear used are the Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO air cooler, the Corsair Hydro Series H100i all-in-one water cooler, and the LittleDevil Phase Change PC-V2 single stage phase change cooling.

The results are interesting. On air cooling, Martijn achieves a 12% overclock; using the all-in-one this increases to 17%, and using sub-zero cooling we end up with a 26% overclock. There is no information on whether the cpu was delidded and based on the high temperature under load (+15°C), we assume it wasn't. For overclocking, delid is important with Skylake!

For more information, pictures, and details, check out MSI's Gaming Blog!