We’re overclocking the Core i9-12900K CPU up to 5500 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the GIGABYTE Z690 AORUS MASTER motherboard.

I’ll speed run you through the BIOS settings and provide some notes and tips along the way. Please note that this is for entertainment purposes only and most certainly not the whole picture. Please don’t outright copy these settings and apply to your system. If you want to learn how to overclock this system, please check out the longer SkatterBencher article.

Alright, let’s do this.

Core i9-12900K Overclock Settings

When you’ve entered the BIOS, enter the Advanced Mode and stay in the Tweaker menu.

Set Enhanced Multi-Core Performance to Disabled.

Enter the Advanced CPU Settings submenu.

Set Active Turbo Ratios to Manual. Here’s where we’ll set up our dynamic overclock where 2 P-cores will boost to 5.5 GHz, all P-cores will boost to 5.2 GHz, and all E-cores will boost to 4 GHz.

• Set Turbo Ratio (1 P-Core Active) and (2 P-Core Active) to 55
• Set Turbo Ratio (3 P-Core Active) to 54
• Set Turbo Ratio (4 P-Core Active) to 53
• Set Turbo Ratio (5 P-Core Active), (6 P-Core Active), (7 P-Core Active) and (8 P-Core Active) to 52
• Set Turbo Ratio for 1 to 8 E-Core Active to 40

Leave the Advanced CPU Settings submenu.

Set Extreme Memory Profile(X.M.P) to Profile3. This will load the most aggressive of the 3 XMP profiles of my DDR5 memory sticks.

Set Vcore Voltage Mode to Adaptive Vcore. Adaptive Voltage mode enables a dynamic CPU voltage that will scale according to the set CPU frequency. This matches with our Active Turbo Ratio configuration.

Set VF Offset Mode to Selection. This opens up the Advanced Voltage Offset options which allow us to modify the voltage of specific points on the CPU V/f curve.

• Set VF Point 6 Offset to -0.025V. This reduces the voltage for 48X ratio by 25mV.
• Set VF Point 11 Offset to +0.075V. This increases the voltage for 55X ratio by 75mV over the default adaptive voltage from 1.32V to 1.40V

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Core i9-12900K Overclock Performance Improvement

To make sure everything is working as intended we re-run some benchmarks and check the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better; and all are higher.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX enabled, the average CPU P-core clock is 4918 MHz and average CPU E-core clock is 3996 MHz with 1.197 volts. The average CPU temperature is 99 degrees Celsius and the average CPU package power is 303.2 watts.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX disabled, the average CPU P-core clock is 5151 and average CPU E-core clock is 4000 MHz with 1.281 volts. The average CPU temperature is 99 degrees Celsius and the average CPU package power is 311.8 watts.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 5500 MHz.

And that’s it, thanks for reading and see you next time!