ASUS X99 ROG Rampage V Extreme Review

OC Socket

We mentioned it in the Intel i7-5960X review, and on page one of this one, and here in all its glory is the ASUS OC socket. Because ASUS have got the patent out on it, details are scarce. Certainly there is no clear indication of exactly what it’s doing under the hood, beyond enabling extra pins. Obviously enabling any extra features on the CPU, and especially ones that aren’t part of the Intel specification, has to be done with a clear benefit.

There certainly isn’t a shortage of new pins on the ASUS OC Socket. The Intel LGA2011v3 socket is on the left, the ASUS OC on the right, and you can see how many of the holes have been filled in on the ASUS OC socket. There are hardly any gaps left.

ASUS state that the additional pins ensure you can eke more performance out, at lower voltage, than is otherwise available. If those features are part of the Intel chip, but just switched off, then have ASUS taken the opportunity to remove the next Tick from the Intel roadmap? Is this a similar scenario to the old AMD Black CPUs that had cores you could enable in the BIOS? For the moment we have only tested on ASUS ‘boards so don’t know if this truly is a staggering turn of events bordering on genius, or a Windows phone in an Android world.