ECS and ASUS to Allow Overclocking on Non-Z Motherboards

Just a few days ago we reported that ASRock had found a backdoor to allow overclocking of unlocked Haswell processors on B and H series motherboards. Well now, according to Xbit Labs, ECS is releasing a BIOS with a feature that does the same on its H87, B85 and, even, H81-based products. Let’s remember that the BIOS setting implemented by ASRock last month, and now ECS, allows for overclocking through the unlocked multiplier of K-series Haswell processor, a feature that is normally available only on motherboards based on Intel’s own Z87 chipset.

Furthermore, since the ECS announcement, word has transpired that ASUS is preparing to do the exact same for its lineup of “non-Z” motherboards. A forum post by an official staffer at ASUS ROG forums points to a number of ASUS products that will receive a BIOS update in the coming days, starting July 11th. In total nine products are listed, six of them are H87-based, three are B85 motherboards.

If we wanted to get ahead of ourselves here, we could foretell that other manufacturers will announce similar BIOS updates in the coming weeks. The feature seems pretty simple to reverse engineer and quite fast to implement in new BIOS releases.

Let’s note, though, that Intel still did not comment on any of these announcements.

– dostov