ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Extreme 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.

Or.. The factory boost speed backed by the ASUS AI Overclocking feature.  It doesn’t do much that you can normally see but, does help to increase performance by tweaking individual core clocks during key loading situations.

To help with the overclocking effort it was decided to augment the performance with a healthy memory overclock of 8200 MT/s (Mhz).  When combined with the AI CPU Overclock showed a noticeable performance gain.

There is a sneaky trick that motherboard makers pull to basically Min-Max performance when it comes to multi core CPUs.  As we have noticed, when running every core at full speed it will generate too much heat and start to throttle or cause system issues.  The solution to this is to have 2 or more cores run at a much higher speed while the rest of the CPU is throttled back to remain stable.  If the loads get too high then the entire CPU will throttle back.

This type of overclocking (Boosting) is rather disappointing in some regards since it really provides a net zero in clock speed and attempts to alter the clock speed often need to be done on a per-core basis.  Given that I was on an AIO I didn’t see the ROI in TEC just for a few extra MHZ.  However, I was able to seem some really good results when I combined the ASUS AI Overclocking with some high performance memory.