Overclocking - Sonic go fast?

Firstly ASRock locked down the default power limit (PL1/PL2) to 253 watts as a maximum and requires manually unlocking it. This will give you a prompt warning not to or risk damaging components. When Undervolt Protection is enabled (default), no voltage adjustment will be allowed inside the OS. This can cause confusion for those looking to overclock the CPU or even undervolt, as it just will not work.


Cinebench R23 HWBOT Submission Link

Once those BIOS settings are adjusted, it was time for a quick overclocking session. PWM Switching Frequency and Load Line Calibration were left on default values. Using the same principle rules from the 12th generation Intel processors as a guide, the session started off the same with a baseline test at stock configuration to get the basics out of the way. Once done, it was time for the brute all-core overclock, simply because it is the easiest when constrained by time. Often undervolting and picking 2-cores for highest frequency will yield better results for power efficiency, but is it quite the undertaking to validate on each and every motherboard tested.

The Vcore droop was minimum during load and actually had more of a overshoot for this motherboard. Using ASRock A-Tuning. CPU P and E-cores ratios were raised and a negative voltage offset was used to pass R23 with 5.7 GHz (P) and 4.4 GHz (E). This was just a basic automatic overclock and should not be considered 100% validated. It "works" and that's about the extent of testing done.

Memory Overclock

By default the ASRock Z790 PG Sonic Edition has the VDD2 and CPU_VDDQ_TX tied to the DRAM voltage. While DDR5-8000 is bootable into Windows using just XMP, it is not stable whatsoever.


DDR5-7200 HWBOT Submission Link

Because this is motherboard isn't designed for heavy memory overclocking, minimal time was spent testing different configurations using strictly XMP without any BIOS voltage adjustments, DDR5-7000 was the highest passable frequency for y-cruncher 2.5B and memory stress test software.