Hexus has reported that ASRock's has removed its SKY OC feature in a BIOS update that appeared yesterday.

ASRock, MSI, Biostar, ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards started putting the feature in their cards in December last year. ASRock and Biostar promoted it. Biostar even called its non-K overclocking HyperOC.

Other vendors seemed pretty certain that they would get an angry call from Chipzilla eventually and did not mention the new tech.

The performance uplift possible via this BCLK overclocking method was impressive. They could make a Core i3-6100 perform faster in Cinebench than the Core i5-4430, even when all four cores were flat out. In other tests, including gaming, these two chips were pretty much the same. 

Of course that was never going to sit well with Intel as it charges rather a lot more for its i5 chips than the i3.

ASRock has updated its Intel Z170 motherboards with two tweaks; 1. Update CPU microcode to 0x76, and 2. Remove SKY OC function. It did not say why.

If you want to keep the tech there should be no pressure for you to upgrade. An earlier BIOS update from ASRock, just a fortnight ago, included a microcode to fix the Skylake complex workloads bug and otherwise there is little need for an upgrade.

You can even see the older BIOS versions on the ASRock website.

Our guess is that there will be other motherboard vendors who will be following ASRock soon.