Overclocking

Overclocking the 12th generation Intel processor comes with a light learning curve owing to new voltages, and the new E-cores. I am certainly not an expert on the subject, but am making some personal progress through trial and error. Now that Alder Lake CPUs have been out long enough for a wide range of testing, the overclocking community suggests keeping it at or below 1.35 V for long-term use. However, please do not take my applied settings as a standard or copy my voltages, and ask on the TPU forums if you have questions related to voltages and general safety tips.

Even though the ITX form factor may seem at odds with the term overclocking, all settings related to overclocking have been accounted for. ASRock has deployed ten 105 A power stages; It isn't always just about the maximum output of the power stages, though this is more than enough for the average overclock. You have two main ways to overclock these CPUs, and it just depends on personal preference. Either one performs an all-core overclock or chooses two of the best cores and aims for the highest overclock on those alone. In the end, I settled for the highest all-core P and E-cores overclock. You of course can set a single core to be higher with an offset, and this motherboard certainly can do it if you have the patience to fine-tune the voltage offsets.

Being that the ASRock software was practically useless without the ability to set the CPU multiplier, I used the BIOS instead this time. At first, I left the E-cores and Ring Cache alone and set out to push the P-cores up until I reached the stopping point of 1.35 V with an all-core OC of 5.3 GHz in Cinebench R23. This was followed up by raising the E-cores to 4.0 GHz and a Ring Cache to match. Overall, if you can keep CPU temperatures under check, the ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 provides a decent overclock on the i9-12900K. Pay no attention to the screenshot voltage, as BenchMate is reporting the load spike due to a high load-line calibration, not the constant applied voltage of 1.35 V.

Memory Overclock

The ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 has limited memory support, but it's adequate for most users. The official maximum supported frequency is DDR5-6400, which is exactly what I reached as well. DDR5-6600 refuses to post regardless of the timings or voltages applied to the CPU memory controller and system agent.