Overclocking

The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 is of course no slouch in the overclocking department. It has the honor of becoming the second board to stay stable on a 5.2 GHz all-core overclock with the voltage set to 1.385 V. Now, it is a little tough to say whether the increase in stability is due to improved hardware or simply six months of BIOS updates, but 5.2 GHz on all eight cores is still pretty impressive.


The postcode display on the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 is well placed for easy problem diagnosis, on the bottom of the board, below the M.2 heatsink. The stylized power and reset buttons sit near the memory slots and are very easy to access.

When it comes to memory clock stability, the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 blew every other board I have ever tested out of the water. While the vast majority of boards I have tested struggled to even boot with the standard XMP profile of my G.SKILL 3866 MHz kit, the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 breezed through it like nothing. I was able to reach 4166 MHz without touching any other settings on the board, an astonishing clock for this kit. Memory can be finicky, and some board/memory combos work unexpectedly well. However, given the precedent with this kit, I would say the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 has excellent potential.