Hardware is one thing, software is another, but the interaction of the two is what really matters in overclocking. Since I currently have no LN2 source, I will also only test and evaluate the behavior with “ambient cooling”, i.e. air or water cooling. I would therefore ask you to take this into account when assessing the results. Following you find a complete list of the test hardware as usual:
| Test systems | |
|---|---|
| Hardware: |
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| Cooling: |
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| Case: |
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| Periphery: |
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| Measuring devices: |
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Gear 1? – – 7F!
Initially I had targeted the Pyprime 2.0 record of 5.888 seconds from the ASRock Z590 OC Formula review, with the intention of beating it. But this turned out to be more difficult than thought, because at first the BIOS version 1.04, which was current at the retail launch of the board, did not allow more than 1.6 V system agent voltage. This is a huge problem especially in the Gear 1 at clock speeds close to DDR4-4000 and was fortunately fixed in the latest 1.05 release.
But even with the new BIOS there are still problems, because the board hangs very often with postcode 7F at startup. As I currently believe to understand it, there seems to be a race condition when loading the saved BIOS settings right at boot time when “Extreme Voltage Mode” is enabled. This results in the board sometimes rebooting itself after the 7F hang, sometimes just shutting down, but in most cases hanging indefinitely and signaling three voltages as missing with the LEDs.
According to the manual the missing voltages are VDDR or VDIMM, VSA and VCCIO. The first two must also be set to the “Extreme” range for Gear 1 operation in Pyprime, again suggesting a connection with “Extreme Voltage Mode”. The only workaround is a manual “cold” start of the system, by holding the power button or switching off the power supply and then restarting it. Without a retry button on the board that would provide this exact feature, this issue adds a significant amount of extra work to bench overclocking in the Gear 1.
EVGA is currently still in analysis and unfortunately I couldn’t even break the 6 second mark in PyPrime 2.0 with the problem, let alone reach my 5.888 s best time, with identical CPU and RAM kit mind you. After many hours and admittedly some frustration, I gave up and turned to other disciplines. As a consequence, it remains to be said that in my personal experience the board is currently not suitable for fine memory tuning in Gear 1, as is virtually indispensable for PyPrime 2.0 or SuperPi 32M, for example.
CPU, cache and Gear 2 at maximum for daily operation
As some had already seen on Luumi on Youtube, the Z590 Dark is supposed to be particularly well suited for running Samsung B-Die in Gear 2. DDR4-4800 with tCL and tRCD 19 in 2x 16 GB dual-rank was shown by the Finnish overclocker to be stable in HCI memstest, and so I set that as my next target.
And lo and behold, a few hours later at least DDR4-4600 17-17-17-34 could be stabilized with my i9 test CPU. Here the issue is again silicon lottery of the memory controller, because while my i9 DDR4-4800 can’t even boot, my i7 at least manages it, but then stumbles in the stability test. This tells me that the board could do the clock speeds if the CPU could keep up. Also interesting is that the multiplier for 4600 Mbps is based on the 100 MHz reference clock, which should actually perform worse than the 133 MHz ones. But the Dark disagreed and reproducibly passes Testmem5 with only 1.35 V SA and 1.5 V VCCIO 2 voltage.
On the CPU side the Z590 Dark was able to run the i9-11900K at a static 5.1GHz on all cores and 4.6GHz on cache with 1.44V Vcore and default LLC. The final result you can see above, almost 11500 points in Geekbench3 Memory Score and 619 Gigaflops in LinpackXtreme with problem size 35000 and that completely stable – yes even with AVX512 and without any offsets!
You don’t believe me? Then here I have the current y-cruncher 1B record for Rocket Lake CPUs with ambient cooling for you. Admittedly, I raised the voltage by 10 mV for this and dabbled with the BCLK a bit for the last MHz, otherwise the result is in the range of 27.0 seconds. With a finer BCLK tuning it might be possible to get some more performance, but as mentioned the Dark can unfortunately only do 0.1 MHz steps. However, with normal 100 MHz BCLK, this setup can be operated for daily use without any problems. The high quality voltage regulation and BIOS optimizations for Samsung B-Die in Gear 2 make it possible.
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