MSI MEG Z890 Godlike 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 5.5Ghz @ 55x multiplier.

To attain this overclock I went a little oldskool and just increased the multiplier on the performance cores and then bumped the efficiency cores up to 48x.  This will apply a light overclock to the entire CPU that should be reflected across the entire benchmark suite.  When doing a real-world overclock like this you need to consider what you are trying to accomplish and if your particular overclock is even going to have an impact.  For instance, the assumption is that performance cores are used for gaming but, depending on the game they may leverage the efficiency cores more.

To help with the overclocking effort it was decided to augment the performance with a healthy memory overclock of 8200 MT/s (Mhz) for a very noticeable gain in certain benchmarks.

Overall, the overclocking effort required to maximize the Intel Core Ultra is not always worth this.  For instance, 5.5Ghz is what the processor will hit under normal boost making the overall clock frequency change a little pointless.  You can see this in the AIDA64 CPU benchmark.  However, bumping the efficiency cores with the XMP memory profile really boosted multimedia performance and translated into higher scores across every benchmark in the suite.

While some hardware enthusiasts will call this overclock a “win” across the board, I am a little skeptical given how little the BAPCo SYSmark scores changed.  As this is the only true “real world” benchmark it is indicating that this particular overclock isn’t going to do much to overall system performance.