Non-K 'Locked' Intel Skylake CPUs can be overclocked with bios tweak.

[The Living Tribunal]

ASRock has come forward with an updated Z170 motherboard BIOS that enables BCLK (base clock) overclocking with any Skylake CPU.

Apparently just a simple bios tweak on some ASUS and MSI motherboards have allowed useres to overclock i3's and locked i5's.

Board makers have also confirmed this. This is unique to Skylake because the BCLK isn't tied to the PCie bus.
Interesting. Those people shopping around for a non-k series Intel processor would get more bang for their buck by buying a cheaper 'locked-but unlockable' Skylake generation processor.

TechSpot was eager to try out the latest ASRock BIOS BCLK overclocking capabilities and decided to leverage it at the cheaper end of the Skylake CPU market, on the Intel Core i3-6100. As standard the Core i3-6100 has a base clock of 100MHz with a 37 clock multiplier, providing a 3.7GHz operating frequency. In its tests TechSpot achieved a stable 127MHz BCLK - that's a 1,000MHz overclock thanks to the ASRock BIOS update - a Core i3-6100 running at 4.7GHz.

Impressive results. That is a STABLE 4.7ghz on that core i3-6100.

More info here....

While I can't see pure enthusiasts caring much for this (as the old adage goes 'just throw more cores at it') but I can see this being a huge deal for those looking for a good competitive entry level rig that is budget friendly and able to be pushed even more.