Stefan Mileschin

With the launch of the overclockable Pentium G3258 processor, some motherboard manufacturers have been scrambling to get a cheaper product to market to be the centre point of a Pentium based build. We covered ASRock’s Z97 Anniversary launch and have an upcoming review of an $110 MSI motherboard aimed at the same market, but today ECS is announcing its Z97-PK (PK = Pentium K ?, even though Intel call it the Pentium AE). The main stand out feature of the motherboard is the ‘One Key OC’, which claims to boost the G3258 from 3.2 GHz to 4.7 GHz.

This an impressive claim, given the motherboard relies on a 2-3-phase power implementation with no power delivery heatsink – I would assume that ECS has performed enough testing on enough CPUs to make sure the 4.7 GHz value covers the majority of G3258 dies. Even though ECS lists a ‘One Key OC’ for this functionality, there is no actual physical button on board (like with MSI’s OC Genie), which makes me believe that this is either a software or a BIOS implementation. Ultimately I would have preferred a physical button due to the low number of home users who actually enter the BIOS or install the bundled software.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8401/e...pk-motherboard