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 “Ai Tweaker” section and go down to CPU Core Ratio and set it to “Sync All Cores”. Then set the “ALL-Core Ratio Limit” to what you are shooting for. Continue to scroll down till you get to the voltage settings and then set the CPU Core / Cache Voltage to “Manual Mode” and then right below it set the CPU Core Voltage Override to the voltage you are going for, a good place to start is 1.3V.
Now these settings should work pretty good, but if you run into any issues you can go into the DIGI+VRM menu and set your CPU load-line calibration to Level 4. And then go into the Internal CPU Power Management section and adjust your max limits.
With these settings we were able to boot at 5.1 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. Running at 5.1 GHz and a Vcore setting of 1.38 in the BIOS in completed the benchmark no problem. Our max CPU temperature was 91C.
