Overclocking
Overclocking on the Z490 platform is pretty much the same as on the Z390 platform. So if you are familiar with that, overclocking your 10th gen Intel CPU will be pretty easy. We will be doing all of our overclocking in the BIOS.
So in our BIOS the first thing we are going to want to do is go into the OC Tweaker section and then into CPU Configuration. Scroll down to “CPU Ratio” and set this to “All Core”. Right below that set the “All Core” to what you are shooting for. You will need to enter this value manually. For our Core i9-10900K we started at 50 and went up from there.
Go back into the OC Tweaker menu and navigate to the Voltage Configuration section. Here change the “Voltage Mode” to “OC Mode”. Next change the “CPU CORE/Cache Voltage” to “Fixed Mode”. Finally enter your fixed voltage below that. I would start around 1.30V and go up as needed.
With these settings we were able to boot at 5.2 GHz across all cores on our Core i9-10900K. We first tested our overclock with the AIDA64 system stability test and things were good.
We all know that just selecting the CPU in AIDA64 will not put a massive load on the CPU so we switched to CINEBENCH 20. In our first few tests the benchmark would run, but about half-way through we would get a BSOD. We upped the voltage and changed different settings but we were unable to complete this benchmark at 5.2 GHz. We did drop things down to 5.1 GHz and were able to complete the benchmark run.
I would say to watch your temperatures though, we were hitting over 100C on a few of our cores!
