Overclocking

Looking at HWInfo, EVGA has a few extra temperature sensors for CPU, VREG PWM, System, VDIMM VRM and PCH.


HWBOT Submission Link

After a few months with the Intel 13900K CPU, overclocking is fairly straight forward and hasn't changed from the previous generation. Using the 12th generation Intel processors as a guide, it is advised to keep the voltage at or below 1.35 V for long-term use. However, please do not take these applied settings as a standard, or copy the voltages to stay on the safe side, and ask on the TPU forums if you have questions related to voltages and general safety tips.

The EVGA Z790 CLASSIFIED has a number of OC tools that makes the process a bit easier. Giving the Robot OC turner a try, we can see in the Cinebench R23 results, that the score isn't bad, but the wattage... a bit extreme coming in at 430 W. The voltage readout is incorrect in the results, as software often does that. Still, it used 1.4 V to achieve this and is above what would be a good daily long term voltage.

Manual overclocking yielded better results with an all-core of 5.7 GHz and 2 Cores at 6 GHz with 1.35 V as the maximum value. 100 °C may seem on the high side, but Intel says its perfectly fine, with the KS model having the limit increased to 115 °C. Still though, regardless if this temperature is personally acceptable, cooling is a different story. Burst runs like this are fine, but aren't sustainable for long durations. Next stop would to void the warranty and delid the CPU. Maybe go with direct die cooling as well. In any case, the EVGA Z790 CLASSIFIED is perfectly capable of accommodating high CPU overclocking with minimal effort.

Memory Overclock

HWBOT Submission Link

Memory overclocking was quite a disappointment and unexpected to say the least. Before getting going into details, it needs to be noted the primary memory kit used is only binned to DDR5-7200. As such, EVGA gets a bit of leeway here because manually overclocking memory is different per brand. Most secondary and tertiary timings and PLL voltages are generally left alone in favor of the motherboards ability to pick the best settings more accurately.

Starting off with the good news. This motherboard does post DDR5-8200, meaning, if you take a well binned CPU, and have the right memory kit, its possible. Now the rest is the bad news. For those thinking DDR5-8200 is stable in Windows, it is not, though I cannot fault EVGA on that one. The highest frequency that was fully stable using the motherboard auto voltages and just XMP profile was a mere 6800 MT/s. 7200 MT/s is the highest binned kit on hand, but that failed y-cruncher 2.5 B. As such, it does not get a pass. The highest "stable" memory speed was 7600 MT/s, but that had very loose manual secondary and tertiary timings so it could pass.

From observation, the System Agent (SA), VDD2 and VDD_TX voltages were quite different compared to other vendors. EVGA auto settings used 1.4 V for the SA, which is overkill and ends up causing stability issues too. Lowering it to 1.25 V allowed DDR5-7200 to pass y-cruncher. Overall, even with manually setting the voltages and playing with the timings, DDR5-7600 was the highest achievable and it wasn't even a good score. Using the newest BIOS 1.07 (BETA) was worse as DDR5-7800 no longer posted and would boot loop indefinitely. It is clear, some work needs to be done on the memory side with supporting CPU voltages and better auto timings for the secondary and tertiary. EVGA is extremely aggressive with these and it does give better benchmark scores and higher frames rates in games, but at the chance of not being actually stable to begin with. This is especially concerning at higher memory speeds.

Memory kits and CPU used were retested on MSI Z790 ACE; Y-Cruncher 2.5 B passed. DDR5-7800 passed as well with Gigabyte Z690 Tachyon