Aorus Z790 Elite X WiFi 7 Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 5.757Ghz @ 57x multiplier and 101BCLK.

While this sounds impressive it is, in fact, the default clock for the Core i9 14900K which would not run any faster than the Turbo Boost settings.  To attain this overclock I did two things.

• Raise the Base Clock by one(1) Mhz
• Set the 6Ghz+ setting in the UEFI, this will configure two cores to run at 6.2Ghz.
• Set XMP profile to 7600Mhz

I was running memory that would easily run 8000Mhz+ but, in my testing the scores actually got slower and the 7600Mhz range turned out to be the sweet spot.

Dual core auto overclocking is pretty much worthless in the real world since any load on the system will throttle those cores down and eventually equalize the clocks across the Performance and Efficiency cores.  Each core type has a default clock and rarely responds to settings in the UEFI.  For instance, you can set everything to 6Ghz along with a voltage bump and it will run that fast at idle however, they will start to throttle down to meet thermal limits until the heat is under control.

What most do not realize is that setting a higher clock often requires a voltage bump and will often make the system slower than if you stuck with auto settings due to the added thermal load on your cooler.  That is unless you are super cooling with LN2.

By tweaking the system, I was able to get a slight boost from the factory settings but, I would be lying if I didn’t say that Intel and Gigabyte have done an exceptional job at tuning the Raptor Lake refresh processors on this system. 

As a final thought: A motherboard in this range isn't really designed for the type of overclocking that would net a respectiable result, instead you are expected to simply run with the factory settings and enjoy yourself..