While most people will just dive into their system's BIOS or use a Windows-based tool to squeeze that extra bit of performance on-the-fly, MSI wants to make things easier for overclockers. With its upcoming P55 motherboards for Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors, the company will be introducing the new Direct OC feature, which will see three overclocking buttons located directly on the printed-circuit board.
The plus and minus buttons will let you tweak the system's base clock in real time with 1MHz increments, while the remaining OC Genie button can automatically overclock the processor to its maximum. In a short video embedded after the jump, you can see an MSI P55-GD65 board and Lynnfield engineering sample with a 133.7MHz default base clock and a multiplier of 17. Hitting the plus button four times brings the base clock to 137.7MHz, which pushes the CPU from 2.27GHz to 2.34GHz.
It's may not be as impressive as Asus' bay-mounted overclock assistant, the OC Station, but it will definitely go easier on your wallet. Furthermore, MSI plans to include a new "V-Kit" in all of its P55 motherboards, a feature overclockers and benchmark fans will find useful to keep track of motherboard voltages with a multimeter.