Overclocking

For overclocking, I have kept the same procedures as 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 Pro AX 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 my i9-10900K and 5.1 GHz on the i9-11900K sample. 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 Pro AX performed about average, reaching 3900 MHz stable at XMP timings and voltages on my Trident Z Neo kit with my i9-10900K, and 3800 MHz on my i9-11900K.

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.