Overclocking

Overclocking the 12th generation Intel processor comes with a light learning curve owing to new voltages and the new E-cores. I am certainly not an expert on the subject, but am making some personal progress through trial and error. Now that Alder Lake CPUs have been out long enough for a wide range of testing, the overclocking community suggests keeping it at or below 1.35 V for long-term use. However, please do not take my applied settings as a standard or copy my voltages, and ask on the TPU forums if you have questions related to voltages and general safety tips.

The MSI Z690 Unify is orientated towards CPU overclocking with the optional Tuning Controller header that can be wired up for real-time BLK adjustments, among other things. MSI has deployed nineteen 105 A power stages, which is more than enough for even the most extreme overclocks. In fact, the MSI Z690 Unify HWBOT CPU frequency record at the time of writing for this motherboard is 7.41 GHz using liquid nitrogen by SHIMIZU.

There are two main ways to overclock these CPUs, and it just depends on personal preference. Either one performs an all-core overclock or chooses two of the best cores and aims for the highest overclock on those alone. In the end, I settled for the highest all-core P and E-cores overclock. You of course can set a single core to be higher with an offset, and this motherboard certainly can do it if you have the patience to fine-tune the voltage offsets.

While I often will use XOC software for overclocking inside Windows, MSI Dragon Power did not function correctly for me. Therefore, I resorted to the BIOS instead. With every Alder Lake overclock, the process is the same, At first, I left the E-cores and Ring Cache alone and set out to push the P-cores up until I reached the stopping point of 1.35 V with an all-core overclock of 5.4 GHz in Cinebench R23. This was followed by raising the E-cores to 4.3 GHz with the Ring Cache left on Auto. Overall, if you can keep CPU temperatures under check, the MSI MEG Z690 Unify provides excellent overclocking for any supported CPU.

Memory Overclock

When it comes to memory, I was disappointed by the discrepancy between the QVL list and my results. The product specifications on the website cite DDR5-6666 (OC), but I could not get DDR5-6600 stable in Windows, and 6666 MT/s refused to boot. To put this into context, with the same CPU, memory, and voltage, 7000 MT/s is at least bootable and semi-stable on a different motherboard, with 6933 MT/s completely stable.

I also ventured to try four single-rank 6400 DIMMs and was limited to 5000 MT/s. This bit was unsurprising as 5200 MT/s is what I achieved using the ASUS Z690 Hero. This lower frequency has more to do with the limitations of the Alder Lakes IMC, though signal integrity and tracer lengths play a role as well.