Maximus Z690 and Alder Lake: Modern CPU’s require Modern Overclocking Solutions

[sblantipodi]

Shamino is the source. He is a guru around here. I have used his bios versions without reservation over the years. He is the author after all. Â*

My motherboard costs 1200€, I'm a little worried of flashing "non official firmware".

[stormflora]

So how much more confusing is it to overclock on a 12th Gen than it is on a previous gen?

Just looking through these instructions is giving me a headache, and I'm pretty experienced with how overclocking was like on an ASUS board before.

[MikeJeffries]

Asus Z690, Maximus series and Alder Lake: The best tools for the best FPS.

First, let me start by thanking Shamino @ ROG Asus for allowing me and the other testers to put this exciting new hardware through its paces and experiment with the new overclocking features and architecture changes, and for the hard work to get these boards running well with these new features.

Also I need to thank cstkl1 and RobertoSampiao for helping me write this. Without their help, I would never have been able to do this.
And VERY BIG thank you to Skatterbencher for his excellent, precise, clear cut youtube videos on explaining these features and helping me with this guide.

Disclaimer ! These settings and methods were tested on *ENGINEERING* Qualification Sample CPU's ("QS") and
pre-production boards, so it is possible that some features may perform differently, slightly differently
identically, or even not work at all on retail CPU's. While QS samples tend to reflect final retail hardware, there may still be undocumented differences, errata, thermal issues or features that may be present or not present on retail parts.

AVX-512 support is available with Asus boards! Some of you may really love this but I am not sure if AVX512 was intended or QA'd by Intel, VRM limits may not be set for high OCP limits with AVX512. I encountered OCP with AVX512 at 5.2 ghz, so if you encounter it, you can change CPU Current Capacity in Digi+VRM.

To use AVX-512, please disable all of the E-cores. The AVX512 offsets and clipping are available just like they were and described in the Rocket Lake Z590 guide.

*MEMORY STUFF and DDR5*

DDR5 operates in 2x32 bit mode rather than 1x64 bit mode. Power management (PMIC) has also been moved from the motherboard to the memory, so the memory itself manages the voltages.

The new changes to the bank structure means that two sticks of DDR5 are operating in the equivalent of "Quad channel" mode when compared to DDR4. DDR4 and DDR5 memory should no longer be compared on an apples to apples level due to the number of changes.
There are two channels per dimm and two memory controllers on the DDR5 side so the dims operate in quad channel mode for 2 sticks. CAS latency seems to have a lesser effect on latency on DDR5 than 4, for example. Max Trefi can go up to 262k, but there is no noticeable benefit from going higher than 65535, and a lot of risk of increasing stability problems with high heat. TRCD/TRP can now be set separately, focus on these for your overclocks, as well as the subs.

Yeeted tREFI may also risk an instant BSOD when you stop a stress test when the memory heats up or when you use sleep mode.
PMIC defaults to 1.10v for VDD and VDDQ. Some memory modules may want up to 50m-100mv higher VDDQ than VDD when overclocking. A "high voltage" mode allows higher than 1.43v, however this is an actual register toggle within the memory itself. Some modules are not compatible with this register, so enabling it will just reset the voltage back to default, or prevent booting at all. More accurately it uses a target voltage based on 10mv resolution calculation rather than 5mv, which means the real voltage will be much lower than what you think you set, if you are using incompatible sticks.

Hey Falkentyne! It's been about 2 years since you helped me on the z390 and 9900ks overclock. Im having a tough time with the OC for this 12900k. Im not sure if you remember, but Im kind of a noob when it comes to OC and it seems like from the info you posted, it got alot more technical with the new architecture.

I saw a vid posted by Jayztwocents on youtube where he manually played with the clock/voltages and then tried the asus AI Overclock on the same board that i have - the z690 Hero. He came pretty close in the benchmark scores so he recommended just doing an AI Overclock and manually tuning the voltages down if anything.

So I tried this route. I set the P and E cores to AI Overclock and then ran Cinebench R23 and was successful with 27000+ scores in multiple runs that i tried.
But then I also tried to lower the core voltages and I set it to Adaptive and then an offset of 0.05v, and that worked. I ran CB23 at -0.07 and it worked. Then it crashed once when i tried with an adaptive offset of -0.1v

So I went back to -0.07v and i looked through your guide and found your recommendation of trying the ALD version of Prime95. The moment i hit run on Small FFT's, it immediately freezes and BSOD's.

What would you recommend I do to see if I can pass Prime95, but using the AI Overclock? Should I INCREASE the offset with a positive amount? I tried at the Auto Voltage that it sets to (which i believe was around 1.38v), but prime95 didnt work then either.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Shamino]

Hey Falkentyne! It's been about 2 years since you helped me on the z390 and 9900ks overclock. Im having a tough time with the OC for this 12900k. Im not sure if you remember, but Im kind of a noob when it comes to OC and it seems like from the info you posted, it got alot more technical with the new architecture.

I saw a vid posted by Jayztwocents on youtube where he manually played with the clock/voltages and then tried the asus AI Overclock on the same board that i have - the z690 Hero. He came pretty close in the benchmark scores so he recommended just doing an AI Overclock and manually tuning the voltages down if anything.

So I tried this route. I set the P and E cores to AI Overclock and then ran Cinebench R23 and was successful with 27000+ scores in multiple runs that i tried.
But then I also tried to lower the core voltages and I set it to Adaptive and then an offset of 0.05v, and that worked. I ran CB23 at -0.07 and it worked. Then it crashed once when i tried with an adaptive offset of -0.1v

So I went back to -0.07v and i looked through your guide and found your recommendation of trying the ALD version of Prime95. The moment i hit run on Small FFT's, it immediately freezes and BSOD's.

What would you recommend I do to see if I can pass Prime95, but using the AI Overclock? Should I INCREASE the offset with a positive amount? I tried at the Auto Voltage that it sets to (which i believe was around 1.38v), but prime95 didnt work then either.

Any help would be appreciated.

for prime95 you either have to downclock+more voltage or use a big avx offset. there arent that many people willing to sacrifice like that these days. so you have to decide if its worthit.

[MikeJeffries]

for prime95 you either have to downclock+more voltage or use a big avx offset. there arent that many people willing to sacrifice like that these days. so you have to decide if its worthit.

Thanks for the heads up on that. But if i can pass CB R23, is that more of a "real world" scenario? or should I test another stress test app?

[Shamino]

you define your own real world, it makes perfect sense to test it with the heaviest load you will run on that pc, if youre a prime95 hobbyist then you have to use that. if not i would say realbench is a great stress test.

[MikeJeffries]

you define your own real world, it makes perfect sense to test it with the heaviest load you will run on that pc, if youre a prime95 hobbyist then you have to use that. if not i would say realbench is a great stress test.

ye im just a gamer that needs to squeeze out as much as possible for a Pimax 8kx VR Headset to run at a decent framerate.Â*
Im Not an overclocking hobbyistÂ*
Ill try realbench as well. Thanks!Â*

[Falkentyne]

ye im just a gamer that needs to squeeze out as much as possible for a Pimax 8kx VR Headset to run at a decent framerate.Â*
Im Not an overclocking hobbyistÂ*
Ill try realbench as well. Thanks!Â*

If you can pass Cinebench R23 looping for 30 minutes with the test stability preset and you can pass Cinebench R15 manually running it 10 times in a row without bsod or hard lock (R15 seems to require more vcore than R20/R23 even though R15 doesn't use AVX, especially when E cores are disabled), you should be full gaming stable.

If you can pass Stockfish AVX2 or BMI2 (BMI or the "Haswell" builds are apparently harder than AVX2) chess engine on all 24 threads (16 for disabled E cores on 12900k), with Arena chess GUI client for Stockfish, infinite analysis for an hour without a random shutdown, hard lock or BSOD, you're stable enough for anything except Prime95 small FFT FMA3 (ADL compatible 30.7 build 9 or newer), which is on a whole other level of absurdity.

[eezeypeezey]

Hi folks - perhaps adjacent to the overclocking topic exactly, but I can't get my DDR5 RAM to be stable enough to limp into Windows 11 more than once before a crash, even with XMP disabled. Using slots B1 and/or B2 works fine with XMP off, or XMP on (I can't remember at the moment if I use XMP I or XMP II).
Here's a recent reddit post I made with more details - https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/commen...eb2x&context=3

Specs:
-Asus Prime z690-A (version 801 of bios - I see that 802 has been released here now: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthrea...olutions/page2)
-CORSAIR Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5 5200
-i7-12700k with Arctic Freezer II 240 (with LGA1700 conversion kit used)
-Windows 11 (fully updated)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[Shamino]

Hi folks - perhaps adjacent to the overclocking topic exactly, but I can't get my DDR5 RAM to be stable enough to limp into Windows 11 more than once before a crash, even with XMP disabled. Using slots B1 and/or B2 works fine with XMP off, or XMP on (I can't remember at the moment if I use XMP I or XMP II).
Here's a recent reddit post I made with more details - https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/commen...eb2x&context=3

Specs:
-Asus Prime z690-A (version 801 of bios - I see that 802 has been released here now: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthrea...olutions/page2)
-CORSAIR Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5 5200
-i7-12700k with Arctic Freezer II 240 (with LGA1700 conversion kit used)
-Windows 11 (fully updated)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

try putting the primary dram timings in the timing page to auto first.