Review : ROG Strix Z790-A Gaming Wifi D4

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CPU and MEM overclocking:

Protocol:

Before starting, it is necessary to have one or more reference scores with our i5-13600KF at stock frequencies , that is to say, without having made any modification except having activated the XMP profile. It is also very important to have at hand a sheet that will allow you to note down all the tests you will perform as well as the results or failures. Personally, I have hundreds of sheets of my tests on which I sometimes go back to know how the processor behaved on such motherboard or in such test conditions. My own little bible.

For H24 overclocking, it will of course be necessary to take more time to fine-tune the voltage in order to provide it with the minimum necessary, but also to adjust each core independently if you want to take advantage of the maximum performance.

Load-Line Calibration in the BIOS:

In the case of Rocket Lake, even though Asus advises a Level 4 for overclocking, I opted for a Level 7 in order to have the least vdroop possible.
Basically, I want the voltage chosen to be as close as possible to the load voltage. In the tables below, you can see the selected voltage, the effective voltage in idle and finally in load . The readings are made with a multimeter at the PCB of the motherboard. It is very important to know the real voltage brought to the different components but especially to your processor.

Overclocking under watercooling in different steps :

As usual, I will start the tests by choosing, via the BIOS, a starting frequency applied on the 6 P-Cores of the i5-13600KF. I chose a starting frequency of 5500 MHz with a multiplier of 55, a BCLK of 100, a voltage of 1.30 volt and a Level 7. All the other options are in AUTO. I already had the opportunity to test my i9-13900K and it is far from being a war lightning unfortunately.

The idea is then, in the OS, to test the stability on several runs of Cinebench R23 multithread . If it’s stable, I increase the frequency by 100 MHz while checking the stability again. If the benchmark crashes, I increase the voltage by 0.05 volt increments in order to regain a stability allowing to run the benchmark. The objective is to get a “quick” idea of the maximum benchmarkable frequency. When we encounter crashes with the P-Core, we move on to overclocking the E-Core.

Here is what we got for the i5-13600KF at 1.30 volt: 5.7 GHz for the P-Core and 4.6 GHz for the E-Core. The reference score is on the left and on the right the one obtained after overclocking.

Memory overclocking:

But how long has it been since we overclocked DDR4 memory! Our big OC profiles did not pass or were not stable in benchmark. Here we simply increased the frequency from 4000 to 4800 MT/s in 17-18-18-34 at 1.525 volt in order to gain performance.

The lack of time did not allow us to invest more in the overclocking of the memory, but no doubt we could certainly get much better scores especially when we know the potential of the Z690 D4 version!