Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed, so the results may vary depending on certain conditions and hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what you are doing. High voltages may damage hardware, and the warranty will not cover it.
The Steel Legend WiFi has a solid power design, and there were no problems on the motherboard’s side to reach 5.7GHz on all cores of our i7-13700K CPU. The problem was on the CPU’s side as it runs very hot, and it was at the edge of throttling most of the time, reaching even 106°C. For cooling was used ASUS Ryujin II 360 AIO, so one of the best options if we won’t count custom water cooling.
It’s possible to set 5.5-5.7GHz on all P-cores and 4.5GHz on E-cores. However, I recommend leaving settings at default as we won’t see a significant performance gain while the power draw and temperatures will go up.
Below you can see a 3DMark Time Spy Extreme result with RAM overclocked to DDR5-6800 CL32-40-40 1.45V. This was a maximum stable setting, while higher voltages and more relaxed timings let to randomly boot at a maximum of DDR5-6933. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of early BIOS or something else, but I would expect at least DDR5-7200 from a Z790 motherboard.
Even without overclocking, we should be satisfied with the performance that Z790 Steel Legend WiFi offers.
