 Hey there, buddies. We're gonna take this cheap CPU and overclock it 25%, guy. At least that's how it used to be. When I built my first gaming PC, I didn't have a lot of money, but thanks to a vibrant overclocking community, it was possible to save 50 or even $100 on your CPU without feeling like you were totally missing out compared to your wealthier friends. That's what Intel took away from us when they restricted overclocking to their more expensive K-series CPUs and their premium chipset motherboards. I mean, it's not really tuning if they only allow it on the factory tuned models, is it? But nothing's more enticing to tuners than an artificial restriction. And I have got something pretty cool to show you. This is a Core i5-12500, a $210 chip that we've got running at a whopping 25% faster. Now Intel doesn't want you to have this, but I do. So let's take a closer look at it, shall we? After we take a closer look at our sponsor. SignalRGB. With SignalRGB, you can control and sync your favorite RGB devices with one free app. Check out their massive library of effects, audio visualizers, and more at the link in the video description. If you wanna play by their rules, Intel requires specific CPU and motherboard pairings to overclock your PC. But whatever you might think of MSI, they've done us a huge solid going against Intel's wishes and sending over their Meg B660M Mortar Max motherboard. It's got all the usual goodies, PCIe Gen 5, Dual Gen 4 M.2 slots, a beefy 60 amp VRM, and it's got one unusual goody, the star of the show. It's very own external clock generator, the one, the only, Renesas RC26008. Doesn't have a sexy name, but it's right here on the board. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about how it works later. For now though, we overclock. For today's experiment, we went with the Core i5-12500. It's not necessarily the best bang for the buck, assuming that we're gonna overclock the snot out of it. That might be the 12400, because they both have six cores and 12 threads. But what's cool about this one is that it's the lowest end Intel chip that I would consider to be feature complete, because it supports ECC memory. It's also available for about $210 US. And while I could pay $50 more for the 12600K, which is the entry level overclocking chip, with this puppy, I don't need to. To ensure that we're not gonna run up against a thermal wall, we've gone straight to the top of the line for our cooling with an NH-D15 from Noctua. That might seem like kind of a wacky choice when we're so focused on saving a buck, but a cooler like this one can actually be thought of as a long-term investment, one that you can carry forward to future systems with only a cheap mounting adapter bracket. The frequency or clock speed of the various components of your system, the CPU, the memory, even the PCI express slots, is derived from your system's B clock or base clock times some multiplier. So the safer way to overclock your CPU without risking running anything else out of spec is to simply adjust the CPU multiplier and leave that base clock alone. Unfortunately, that's the method that's behind the Intel paywall, and there is nothing that we can do about it. So we are gonna use that special clock generator chip to enable base clock overclocking, and then we can tune it by adjusting our core ratios. So step one is to adjust our base clock from 100 to 125. Ah, yes, this is fun. To enable CPU overclocking, MSI is actually using a specific microcode, an older version that wasn't successfully locked down by Intel. Now we set our PCore ratio or our multiplier to 40. That is a value that is enabled for this particular CPU. It's just not supposed to be times 125, putting us at five gigahertz. And then to make sure that our poor memory is not going completely out of whack here, we wanna find the closest thing to 3,200. And this is amazing. It does all the math for you. Look at that. For that, we might need a little bit more voltage, and this is a very, very quick and dirty, quick and dirty overclock. Let's see what happens. Well, that's disappointing. It looks like it didn't take. We're only running at four gigahertz, which if we do the math, is our multiplier of 40 times 100 base clock, not 125. Unless task manager is not the best system monitoring tool. Hey, whoa, wait, look at this. It's doing it. Yeah, this chip's not supposed to draw over 120 watts. What is it? We're hitting 82, 83 degrees on an NHD 15 with a six core chip. She's spicy. Anyway, the point is we're running at five gigahertz. Look at this. That's fricking awesome. I was so busy trying to get my hardware info windows sorted out here that I didn't even think about that this is not crashing. Five flipping gigahertz. And look at these scores. We're getting like 15,000, nearly 16,000 points in Cinebench. That's not that far off a flipping like 16 core first gen Threadripper with six cores. I freaking love this. Overclocking on Intel hasn't been this much fun in over a decade. AMD meanwhile has been much more permissive. A little bit more on that later. On both sides, realistically, we have had a similar issue where most of their products are running so close to the red line out of the box that even if you can keep them cool, there just isn't a ton of headroom. And it's these budget chips where you really feel like you're getting a lot more bang for your buck. And there's no doubt that this thing bangs off camera. We pushed it even further to a stable overclock of 5.25 gigahertz on all cores with 1.2 volts of juice. And we saw our performance improved by leaps and bounds. Cinebench is up 25% compared to stock speed and still under 85 degrees. Like what? Yeah, you heard me. That score is almost as good as a core i9 from just last generation out of the box. Giving you enough money left over to pick up both new colors of our waffle long sleeve shirts, lttstore.com. And we found the same thing across the rest of our productivity benchmark suite. Over a minute saved in blender, major improvements in 7-zip and an extra 4,000 points in CPU pass mark. I mean, it is entirely possible that we won the Silicon lottery here and that your 12500 wouldn't go this far without instability. But that's also half the fun of it, isn't it? Which makes me kind of wonder then, are AMD's days of being the budget friendly king coming to an end if we can squeeze this much performance out of a $200 chip? No, for a number of reasons. First up is that unlike Intel, AMD allows you to do basically whatever you want with your CPU, as long as your motherboard's power delivery can handle it. And because they remove arbitrary lockdowns, except in certain cases, 5800X3D, their product lineup is simpler as well. Want graphics? Grab a G series chip. Want anything else? Well, pick the CPU that's right for you based on the core count, clock speed and cache. If you wanna overclock it, just about any board outside of their very budget A series boards is going to allow it. Just your mileage may vary. And unfortunately for the Intel fans out there, Intel fans, you in the house? Woohoo! Hey, there you are. Unfortunately for you guys, the same can't be said for y'all even with this motherboard. Why? Well, because you can't get this motherboard. I mean, it's on the MSI website and you can get the non-MAX version, which does not have the RC26008 chip. But for us to get our hands on this thing, we had to whip out our press credentials and get them to send it to us. And it's not that it's like too new or anything. They showed this thing off months ago and we actually did find a couple of AliExpress listings for it. But the problem is that they've got additional markups on them to the point where they're 230 US dollars. It's not a great deal for a B660 board. Plus you're now adding 30 bucks for international shipping, plus maybe customs or import fees when it shows up, which means that it doesn't really make a ton of sense. For reference, the non-MAX version of this board without the base clock chip, which honestly can't add that much, is only 180 US dollars. So if you're gonna be spending so much more, well, it gets to the point where you might as well just look at a cheaper Z690 board. And also since you're such a baller, you can throw some money our way for a float plane subscription where you can find all the latest extra content, like an hour of bonus footage from the recent build with my sister. And there's another problem with all of this. I alluded to it before, but it needs to be really highlighted here that base clock overclocking can be a much worse kind of unstable than CPU multiplier overclocking. When you're adjusting your CPU multi, the odds of anything worse than a blue screen are pretty low. So you go back into your BIOS, set it a little bit lower and boom, you're back in your game in a couple of minutes. But with base clock overclocking, when they say base, they mean it. CPU, memory, PCI express lane, storage, even peripherals can be affected when you're adjusting this value. And those are components that are not designed to run outside of spec. So you are gonna wanna run a battery of stability tests, disk tests, you get your firm mark, your mem test, and you gotta check and make sure that everything is stable or you could run into crashes or worse, even things like data corruption during real world use. And it gets even worse. While our gaming performance did improve in CPU bound games like CSGO where we gained 50 frames per second, we were already getting 460 frames per second. So unless you're a pro player, no offense, you're probably not, you're not gonna benefit from that difference. Then we transitioned over to modern AAA games where we really could use another 50 FPS and well, the sad story there is that the 12500 is already fast enough that your modern GPU is probably gonna be the bottleneck anyway. So at best we got a couple more FPS. Maybe overclocking is still dead then. I've already talked a lot about how even top tier coolers like the NH-D15 can hardly tame a boosting 12900K. So good luck overclocking it unless you have custom loop liquid cooling or something much more exotic. And then even over on the AMD side, as permissive as they are, if you enable PBO on your 5950X, it's gonna get pretty darn close to its final form without requiring any additional fiddling in the bios. Something we explored recently with pro overclocker Slave is the advantages of undervolting these higher end chips so that they can boost in a stable manner, but without cooking themselves. But then the performance gains from undervolting, they're pretty pedestrian compared to what we showed you guys today, which makes overclocking top tier chips boring, kind of pointless and expensive. So the most frustrating thing about this MSI board, cool product to be clear, really like it, is that it puts us face to face with what we've lost. These lower tier CPUs, man, these things could totally rip if you were just allowed to give them a little bit of extra juice at the expense of nice to haves, like low operating temperatures and a warranty. Intel just won't allow us to do it. Now, MSI didn't respond by the time that we filmed this when we asked why this thing isn't broadly available. Which really sucks. Just like this low effort segue to our sponsor. Squarespace, if you wanna build a brand online, you need a website. But I just learned how to turn the little flashlight on my phone. How am I gonna build a whole website? You may ask. Squarespace can help. Squarespace is your one stop, no frills, all in one platform for expanding your presence onto the internet. Squarespace lets you build beautiful websites, engage with your audience, and sell anything and everything from products to content without needing to attend the Hogwarts School of Tech Wizardry. We love Squarespace so much that we use it here at LMG. Its custom templates make it easy to stand out with a plethora of themes and customization options to fit your needs. You can maximize your visibility thanks to a suite of integrated SEO features. And there's also analytic insights to help you optimize for performance so you can see what's working well and what needs tweaking. Get started today and head to squarespace.com forward slash LTT to get 10% off your first purchase. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out another of Intel's arbitrary lockdowns where we looked at ECC memory support on Alder Lake 12th gen chips. It's also frustrating, but worth a watch.