What method is used to increase the clock speed of a locked CPU on an original equipment manufacturer board?
What method is used to increase the clock speed of a locked CPU on an original equipment manufacturer board?
A significant number of locked boards from Haswell era were potentially overclockable, likely many from AsRock. However, OEM boards weren't.
Purchasing any hardware that is old or used is essentially a risky endeavor. Occasionally, people are forced to do it because they can save a system that still functions well for a significantly lower price than buying a brand new setup. However, in most situations, the funds spent on anything outdated turn out to be a loss, as they could have been better invested in a completely new motherboard, CPU, and memory (platform upgrade). This is mainly because we rarely deal with genuine old stock—let alone used stock that has already experienced some capacitor wear and metal issues.
Moreover, acquiring used components that have already reached most of their lifespan is quite risky, especially outside a few exceptions. In most cases, finding an aftermarket board that allows overclocking suitable for standard Dell, HP, or Lenovo prebuilt OEM systems is unlikely, since these boards are typically proprietary rather than using standard sizes.
Even if you managed to source one, you would never achieve even a small improvement in performance compared to replacing the whole system and building a modern i3 setup. For comparison, the newest Gen i3 models easily outperform the 4th gen i7 in both single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks, and they surpass the 4770k by a significant margin.
The bottom line is clear: as previously mentioned, your options are limited, and even if you could succeed, the results would be minimal and unlikely to match recent releases from Intel, AMD, or other manufacturers over the past few years.
Save your money on your graphics card first, then consider upgrading your platform when necessary. This is the most effective way to address gaming performance issues and overall system capability.
And even if you could, you'd never achieve even a small part of what you'd get by replacing the system with a modern i3 build. For example, the newest Gen i3 easily outperforms the 4th gen i7 in both single and multithreaded tasks, and it surpasses the 4770k by nearly half a mile.
You won't reach 5ghz on a locked Haswell chip; the only option is to adjust the base clock by a few MHz at most before causing issues. In Haswell, the bclk is connected to nearly all components, so once you go past this point, you often realize you've crashed and need to reinstall Windows.
Also, the PLL can't be found because it doesn't exist in this architecture. The bclk generator was relocated inside the CPU for Haswell (probably).