We’re overclocking the Core i5-12400 CPU up to 5300 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard and EK-Quantum custom loop water cooling.

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 them 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.

5 Minute Speedrun

When you’ve entered the BIOS, go to the Extreme Tweaker menu

Set Ai Overclock Tuner to XMP I. This enables the use of the Intel Extreme Memory Profile 3.0 technology and will make the DDR5 memory run at its XMP-rated speed of DDR5-6200.

Set BCLK Frequency to 120.5. The base clock frequency is the reference clock for many parts inside your CPU, including the P-cores, integrated graphics, ring, system agent, memory controller, and system memory. In most overclocking scenarios, you never have to increase the base clock frequency as there are plenty of multiplier ratios available to push your cores or memory to the max. However, on non-K processors, multiplier ratios higher than the default specification are locked, and thus only overclocking the BCLK will increase the frequency. Increasing the base clock frequency impacts many parts inside the CPU, so we’ll need to adjust other settings accordingly to ensure stability.

Set ASUS MultiCore Enhancement to Enabled – Remove All Limits. This unleashes the Turbo Boost 2.0 power limits and allows for an unlimited time at maximum performance.

Set DRAM Frequency to DDR5-6266MHz. This ensures that the DDR5 memory runs at a stable near-XMP frequency despite increasing the reference base clock frequency from 100 MHz to 120.5 MHz.

Set Performance Core Ratio to By Core Usage. We enforce the turbo ratio multipliers from the default i5-12400 specification. This allows for a dynamic higher frequency of up to 2 and 4 active cores compared to when all cores are active. The adjusted BCLK frequency also adjusts the CPU core frequency. So whereas the 1-core boost is 100×44 = 4400 MHz by default, with our adjusted BCLK frequency, it is now 120.5×44 = 5302 MHz.

• Set 1-Core Ratio Limit to 44
• Set 2-Core Ratio Limit to 44
• Set 3-Core Ratio Limit to 42
• Set 4-Core Ratio Limit to 42
• Set 5-Core Ratio Limit to 40
• Set 6-Core Ratio Limit to 40

Enter the AVX Related Controls submenu. While Alder Lake officially does not support AVX-512, it is possible to manually enable support if, one, only P-cores are active and, two, the CPU microcode version is older than 0x18.

Set AVX512 to Enabled

Leave the AVX Related Controls submenu

Enter the Digi+ VRM submenu. The VRM loadline manages the reduction in voltage when the CPU goes from high to low load and vice versa. Since we are using a global adaptive voltage offset for our overclock, we need a high voltage to maximize the peak frequency with a steep voltage drop when all cores are under heavy load to prevent the CPU from overheating.

Set CPU Load-line Calibration to Level 2.

Leave the Digi+ VRM submenu

Enter the Internal CPU Power Management submenu.

Set Regulate Frequency by above Threshold to Disabled. This will prevent the ASUS embedded controller from reducing the CPU power consumption if the CPU temperature is over 90 degrees Celsius.

Leave the Internal CPU Power Management submenu

Enter the Tweaker’s Paradise submenu

Set Unlock BCLK OC to Enabled. This magic option enables BCLK overclocking on Alder Lake non-K processors. BCLK overclocking on non-K is only possible if you use the specific 0x9 CPU microcode version and an external clock generator generates the BCLK. This specific microcode has an oversight where Intel’s BCLK governor does not monitor BCLK when using an external clock generator and thus will not shut down the processor if the BCLK is over the artificial limitation of 103 MHz.

Leave the Tweaker’s Paradise submenu

Set Max. CPU Cache Ratio to 40. This is the maximum default ratio for the Core i5-12400 processor. With our adjusted BCLK frequency, the Ring frequency runs at 4820 MHz.

Set CPU Core/Cache Voltage to Offset Mode. This allows us to increase the CPU voltage to support the overclocked frequency. There are two options to adjust the CPU voltage: override mode and adaptive mode. In override mode, here called manual, we set one voltage applied to all scenarios. In adaptive mode, the voltage scales according to the frequency. Offset mode allows us to offset the entire factory-fused voltage-frequency curve by a specified amount. This means the voltage is reduced when there’s no workload and increased when there’s a high workload.

Set Offset Mode Sign to +

Set CPU Core Voltage Offset to 0.200. This increases the minimum voltage of 0.773V for 800 MHz to 0.968V for 964 MHz (800×1.205) and increases the maximum voltage of 1.128V for 4400 MHz to 1.305V for 5301 MHz.

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Core i5-12400 Overclock Performance Improvement

To ensure 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. We see a maximum performance increase of 43% in the AI Benchmark.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 5300 MHz for every CPU P-core.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX enabled, the average CPU P-core clock is 4802 MHz with 1.216 volts. The average CPU temperature is 100 degrees Celsius. The ambient and water temperature is 23.5.7 and 33.8 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 154.5 watts.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX disabled, the average CPU P-core clock is 4802 MHz with 1.196 volts. The average CPU temperature is 84 degrees Celsius. The ambient and water temperature is 23.5 and 33.0 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 133.5 watts.

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