Intel Core i9-10900K Processor Review

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 Core i9-10900K will be pretty easy. Keep in mind while the Core i9-10900K will boost up to 5.3 GHz that is only on a single core. When we are overclocking we are looking for all 10 cores to run at that speed or higher. We are testing on the ASRock Z490 PG Velocita motherboard so our BIOS settings might differ a little bit from yours.

So in our BIOS the first thing we are going to want to set is the CPU Ratio mode to “All Core” and the “All Core” ratio to what we are going to shoot for. In our case it is 51, which will bring all of our cores to 5.1 GHz. Also if your BCLK is set at “Auto” it is a good idea to set it at “100.00”.

z490 pg velocita bios1

In your Voltage and power settings you are going to want to have a set CPU VCore voltage, we went with 1.35V to start. You may also want to test different load-line calibration settings.

z490 pg velocita bios2

With these settings we were able to achieve an overclock of 5.1 GHz across all 10 cores of the Core i9-10900K.

z490 pg velocita 51ghz 3

This was a completely stable overclock, but keep in mind if you are going to put a heavy workload on the CPU temperatures are going to get hot. Here is a run of Cinebench R20. As you can see things definitely got a bit toasty (we used a Noctua NH-U12A).

z490 pg velocita 51ghz

Running the AIDA64 system stability test with just the CPU checked gives us a less-heavy workload and our temperatures are more in check.

z490 pg velocita 51ghz 2

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