At HWBOT we frequently run opinion polls on the site. You may have seen one on the lower right side of the front page. The idea is to try help eek out the opinions and thoughts of overclockers on a variety of subjects, it’s also just an interesting bit of fun. The most recent opinion poll on the site involved the recent phenomena of non-K-SKU overclocking, surmised with this one simple question: Will you jump on the Skylake non-K overclocking train? The results are out!

Firstly it’s clear that the majority of the 421 voters, 32.54% percent of them, believe that K SKU CPUs are the best choice for overclocking. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise for a number of reasons but clearly the most important reason being that K SKU Intel Core processors are the company’s best performing parts. The reasoning is kind of like realizing that Intel actually bins each and every CPU it produces. The best ones become K Core i7s. Period. I want the best CPU, so I get hold of the top i7 chip and on I go.

The second largest opinion segment however flies in the face of that logic with 26.84% percent of overclockers polled saying yes to Core i3 overclocking (using specialized BIOSes from the motherboard vendor). In real performance terms a dual-core i3 is never going to perform anything like a a quad core i7, regardless of how far you push it, so why all the buzz around overclocking an i3? It could be argued that an Overclocked i3 represents solid value for money. Enabling an overclocker to use more sophisticated cooling to get i5-ish performance from an i3 part, thus saving hundred bucks or so.

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