Overclocking

For Overclocking, I have kept the same procedures that I used for Intel's 10th generation. I have left the "Gear" setting on auto for memory overclocking. Every board tested so far has used "Gear 2" when pushing past the 3600 MHz XMP speed for my Trident Z Neo kit.


The Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Master showed a fair bit of headroom for overclocking, at least for short runs of wPrime. I was able to achieve 5.2 GHz at 1.38 V core voltage on both my i9-10900K and i9-11900K samples. Overclocking is largely limited by temperature because the Intel Core i9 processors will overpower any ambient cooling solution. Depending on settings, the system will either crash or severely drop frequency.


For memory overclocking, the Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Master did well, reaching 3900 MHz stable at XMP timings and voltages on my Trident Z Neo kit with my i9-10900K. My i9-11900K performed even better, reaching 4000 MHz stable.

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 it is a great feature for new overclockers because it gives them a starting point for their manual tuning.