With Intel B760 motherboards rumored to enable overclocking feature, what does it mean for budget users?

Intel B760 motherboards will launch at CES 2023. These will be budget alternatives to the more expensive Z790 options that are already available for purchase.

These cheaper boards do not support features like CPU overclocking and have fewer PCIe lanes as compared to the flagships. This helps keep the price down since lower-end Intel CPUs are locked and cannot be OCed.

However, over the past few years, certain MSI boards have allowed users to overclock their locked Intel CPUs and extract some more performance from them. This feature will reportedly return to the B760 motherboards.

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More information on external CPU overclocking and B760 motherboards

The MSI MAG B660M Mortar MAX WiFi board (Image via MSI)

Intel has multiple launches planned out for CES. The budget B760 motherboards are one of them. Spec-wise, they are not very different from their last-gen counterparts, the B660.

Thus, it is no surprise that these boards are carrying forward some features of the last-gen boards. The MSI B660 Mortar MAX and Tomahawk MAX motherboards supported external BCLK overclocking that allowed users to push the CPUs beyond the rated clock speeds.

Thus, users who have put together a budget setup with a locked Intel CPU and a B-series board can enjoy a tad better performance from their system. The same feature is reportedly being carried over to the new motherboards.

It is worth noting that other board manufacturers have already stopped bundling their products with external CPU overclocking. No other company other than MSI will be implementing external overclocking into their systems.

The B760 Mortar MAX motherboard has been rumored to support the feature via the same Renesas RC260008 chip as the last-gen B660 Mortar MAX. No information on the Tomahawk MAX variant has been leaked yet.

It was first spotted on Twitter, where leaker @g01d3nms4ng0 shared photos of the Renesas chip and a Core i5 12400 running slightly higher than its rated clock speeds. While the locked chip can only boost to 4.40 GHz, the user shared pictures of the CPU hitting 5.00 GHz when paired with the B760 Mortar MAX.

It is worth noting that BCLK overclocking is not as robust as the full control one can enjoy with an AMD B-series motherboard. This method involves changing the base frequency of the system instead of the multiplier to achieve higher clocks.

Alterations made to the base frequency can negatively hurt system stability more often than traditional overclocking. Thus, the results obtained via this technique are never as stable as OCing on the Z-series boards.