We’re overclocking the Core i9-14900K processor up to 6200 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the GIGABYTE Z790 Aorus Master X motherboard and EK-Quantum custom loop water cooling.

I’ll speedrun you through the BIOS settings and provide some notes and tips along the way. Please note that this is for entertainment purposes only and 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.

All right, let’s do this.

5 Minute Speedrun

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

Set GIGABYTE PerfDrive to Unleash. This will unleash the Turbo Boost 2.0 power limits and let the CPU run at unlimited power indefinitely.

Enter the Advanced CPU settings submenu.

Set Voltage Reduction Initiated TVB to Disabled. This prevents the CPU from automatically reducing the voltage based on its current temperature, as this may induce instability when manually tuning the voltage-frequency curve.

Set AVX Settings to User Defined. Now, we can adjust the AVX2 negative ratio offset, which lowers the P-core ratio when using AVX2. The Offset is referenced against the Per P-core Ratio Limit, which we will configure later in this guide.

• Set AVX Offset to 1.
• Set AVX Optimum to Enabled.

Set Active Turbo Ratios to Manual. This enables us to configure a dynamic P-core overclock as we can configure the maximum allowed P-core ratio for a given number of active P-cores.

• Set Turbo Ratio (1 P-Core Active) to (6 P-Core Active) to 62.
• Set Turbo Ratio (7 P-Core Active) and (8 P-Core Active) to 57.

Set Turbo Per Core Limit Control to Manual. Now, we can limit the maximum ratio for each P-core individually regardless of the Active Turbo Ratio configuration.

• Set Turbo P-Core 0, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 Ratio Limit to 62.
• Set Turbo P-Core 1 and 7 Ratio Limit to 61.

Leave the Advanced CPU Settings submenu.

Set High Bandwidth to Enabled.

Set Low Latency to Enabled.

I don’t know precisely what these two settings do, and GIGABYTE won’t tell me. Still, they have a positive impact on performance in memory-sensitive workloads.

Set Extreme Memory Profile(X.M.P.) to XMP 1. This enables the use of the Intel Extreme Memory Profile 3.0 technology and will make the DDR5 memory run at its rated speed of DDR5-7200.

Set Vcore Voltage Mode to Adaptive Vcore. This allows us to control the voltages associated with each CPU core’s voltage-frequency curve.

Set VF Offset Mode to Selection. That gives access to Intel’s Advanced Voltage Offset feature, commonly known as V/F Points. This feature extends the Adaptive Voltage mode by allowing end-users to undervolt or overvolt specific points of the CPU’s factory-fused voltage-frequency curve.

• Set VF Point 6 to 8 Offset to +0.025V.
• Set VF Point 9 Offset to +0.075V.

Enter the Advanced Voltage Settings submenu.

Enter the CPU/VRM Settings submenu. Here, we can make changes to the voltage regulator configuration. We adjust the VRM loadline to minimize the Vdroop, which is the voltage drop when the CPU goes from idle to full load. We chose the VRM loadline with the small Vdroop, so the effective voltage does not deviate much from our manually configured CPU voltage-frequency curve.

Set CPU Vcore Loadline Calibration to High.

Enter the Internal VR Control submenu.

Set IA VR Config Enable to Enabled

Set IA AC Loadline to 1. This ensures the voltage requested by the CPU to the VRM controller does not differ from our user-configured voltage-frequency curve.

Set IA DC Loadline to 50. This matches the choice of the Vcore Loadline Calibration setting we made earlier.

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Core i9-14900K Overclock Performance Improvement

We re-ran some benchmarks to ensure everything works as intended and checked the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better, and all are higher. We see a maximum performance increase of +22.71% in the AI Benchmark.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 6200 MHz.

When running the OCCT CPU SSE Stability Test, the average CPU P-core effective clock is 5645 MHz, and the average CPU E-core clock is 4219 MHz with 1.229 volts. The average CPU temperature is 100 degrees Celsius. The ambient and water temperatures are 26.2 and 30.7 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power and CPU input power are 359.4 and 390.8 watts.

And that’s it. I thank you for reading and the Patreons for the support. See you next time!