Overclocking

The Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra showed a fair bit of headroom for overclocking, at least for short runs of wPrime. I was able to achieve 5.3 GHz at 1.38 V core voltage. However, longer runs were not stable. Overclocking is largely limited by temperature because the 10-core Intel Core i9-10900K will overpower any ambient cooling solution. Depending on settings, the system will either crash or severely drop frequency.


For memory overclocking, the Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra did well, reaching 4000 MHz stable at XMP timings and voltages on my Trident Z Neo kit. Gigabyte has a feature that auto-tunes the memory timings to maintain stability when overclocking. While I disabled it for my test to keep the benchmark standardized, I think this is a great feature for new overclockers because it gives them a starting point for their manual tuning.