Review: AORUS Z790 Tachyon

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DDR5 overclocking:

For memory overclocking, we have of course kept our Teamgroup Delta RGB 7200 MT/s CL34 kit and its Hynix A-die chips. The idea is to choose the kit that we think has the best overclocking potential. And as you can see, we were not mistaken.

The choice of your DDR5 kit according to the memory chips :

As it was already the case for DDR4, if you want to clock your memory, some brands will benefit from a better potential. Currently, the kits announced by the various brands benefit either from Micron chips or Hynix chips or Samsung chips.

The “key” voltages of DDR5:

For memory overclocking, there are 5 key voltages. These are the voltages that will have an impact on the overclocking and therefore on the frequency rise or the tightening of the timings. Depending on the brand of your motherboard and the BIOS, these may have a different name. Let’s see where they are located in the Tachyon BIOS.

These are Internal VCCSA, VDDQ CPU (IVR), VDD2 CPU (Memory Controller) and the memory voltages VDD and VDDQ. It is in the balance of these voltages that the success of the memory overclocking will largely depend.

The BIOS allows “automatic” optimization:

Here is an option that will delight beginners in memory overclocking. While browsing the different BIOS options, we came across three options in the Tweaker tab that seem to have the objective of optimizing the timings and subtimings of your memory kit. So we wanted to test them to check the impact on performance.

These options are called: DDR5 Auto Booster, High Bandwidth and Low Latency. In order to activate them, you have to switch from AUTO to enabled. Let’s see the performance gains as well as the timings and subtimings that have been changed.

The gain in terms of performance and throughput is excellent and it would be a shame to miss out on it. You should know that similar options are also available in some AORUS Z790 and X670E motherboards BIOS.

Manual overclocking of our DDR5 Teamgroup A-die kit:

While things were very easy up to 8000 MT/s, it got more complicated after that. I was able to get to 8200 MT/s quickly enough to get Aida64 through, but it was impossible to finish a Geekbench 3 benchmark. I tried several solutions with more or less success but without really being able to reach the frequencies obtained with the APEX Z790 and the EVGA Z690. I must admit that I am more used to Asus and EVGA BIOS than to the AORUS. Maybe I’m missing an option that would allow me to reach 8400 MHz.

Here are already the results obtained at 8000 MT/s in 32-45-28 and at 8200 MT/s in 34-48-32. The performances are almost identical since even if I went up in frequency, I had to relax the timings.

The potential for memory overclocking does seem to be there, but it requires a lot more research, refining of voltages than on the other two XOC motherboards we’ve tested lately with this Teamgroup A-die kit. The secret really seems, even more so with AORUS, to lie in the voltages.

Above is a table showing the evolution of the scores under AIDA 64 and Geekbench with the different profiles we tested. Remember that the E-Core is disabled to allow a better frequency rise. The measured gains are only representative of the memory overclocking, the processor frequency is always the same. We will put this card in cold mode with our next 13900KS in order to judge its potential.

A little update :

A few hours before the article was published, I was able to tighten the timings to 8200 MT/s to further improve the performance of the memory kit when overclocking.

The next target is 8400 MT/s but for that, we will certainly have to spend a few more hours to find the perfectly balanced voltage profile.