MSI MEG Z890 ACE 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 5.7Ghz @ 57x multiplier.

I feel that I did cheat a little bit to attain this overclock by setting two cores to 57x, followed by two cores at 56x followed by four cores at 55x.  I also boosted the efficiency cores up to 47x and provided a quick voltage bump to smooth things along.

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.

While I feel a bit dirty “cheezing” the core clocks to get this 5.7Ghz overclock there is still a noticeable gain across the entire benchmark suite.  These gains multiply in situations where the efficiency cores tend to do the most work while multicore performance-based benchmarks have a lesser impact.

For the average user, occasional gamer and performance enthusiast there are real gains to be made if you are willing to put in the time to test the various combinations.