Performance in 3D and Overclocking
Results in 3D benchmarks are also high. Just take a look at a couple of 3DMarks and VRMarks.
ASRock Z390 Gaming Phantom-ITX/ac let to build an amazing mini PC which can handle all games. All these results were made on a test rig presented on the top of the page.
Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed, so the results may vary depending on certain conditions and various hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what are you doing. High voltages may damage hardware and it will not be covered by warranty.
Overclocking on the Z390 PG-ITX/ac motherboard is really easy. The motherboard will adjust most settings automatically if we leave them at auto. Also, XMP profiles are working perfectly fine and we can adjust settings above the profile values if we wish higher performance (and memory let us for that).
Setting DDR4-4500 was as easy as to enable XMP profile and set manually DDR4-4500 memory speed from the list. The motherboard adjusted all voltages and sub-timings.
XMP timings were not enough for me so I started to play with additional settings and I was able to set DDR4-4500 17-17-17 1.50V. These settings were not fully stable but once we get better memory kit then will be possible to stabilize. It just proves that the motherboard can make more than our memory kit.
For CPU overclocking I’ve used the i7-9700K processor which just arrived. It’s an Engineering Sample so can be a bit different from what we can see in stores. As we can see on the screenshots, it requires quite high voltage to run at 5.2GHz but the motherboard handles it without issues and the CPU is stable at these settings.
Below is a result made in PCMark 10 which is a quite long benchmark. Overclocking gives us about 300 marks more what is hard to translate into real performance. The i7-9700K has maximum turbo frequency of 4.9GHz on a single core and for most of the time is closer to 4.3GHz so 5.2GHz on all cores is already a big difference.
Overclocking results were made on nothing but Enermax LIQFUSION 240 AIO cooler. I wanted to present results which are actually possible for our readers as we know that 5.2GHz is not the maximum possible on this motherboard but will require much better CPU cooling.
The Z390 PG-ITX/ac was keeping low temperature and was fully stable under load. Even though this motherboard is so small, it can handle a lot. There is no problem to build really powerful and overclocked PC based on this motherboard.
