Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed so that the results may vary depending on certain conditions and various hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what you are doing. High voltages may damage hardware, and it will not be covered by warranty.
Because of the heat, the i9-10900K is not the best CPU for overclocking on ambient temperatures. Even the best water cooling won’t let it overclock high. Our results were made using the Noctua D15 chromax.black cooler so one of the best possible air cooling solutions which you can buy in stores.
We could overclock the CPU to a 5.2GHz on all cores while using AVX/AVX2 instructions. This is a good result considering that the default clock is 4.9GHz. On the other hand, the maximum frequency at default settings is 5.3GHz, which isn’t possible to reach because of CPU limitations. It’s either the CPU itself or thermal limits, but about the same result we could achieve on the PG Velocita, and the same results have other redactions on much more expensive motherboards. It simply proves that the little PG ITX/TB3 is as good for overclocking as high, full ATX motherboard series.
The maximum memory frequency which we could reach was DDR4-4800 using Micron E-die memory. The screenshot you can see on the previous pages of this review. As far as this result is impressive, the even more impressive is DDR4-4500 CL18 using a 2x32GB memory kit! This is clearly the highest result using so high memory capacity, we’ve seen in our redaction.
No matter if we are overclocking or not, the Z490 PG-ITX/TB3 is delivering fantastic results and is highly recommended for a gaming PC.
