ROG Overclockers Show the Power of Alder Lake with ROG Maximus Z690 Apex

Singapore, November 4, 2021 — ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced that overclockers have broken a gamut of world records using ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboards with 12th Generation Intel® Core™ processors.
Each jump to a new microarchitecture brings a host of challenges that overclockers face as they try to understand and adapt to the new hardware. But the transition from the 11th Gen (Rocket Lake) to the 12th Gen (Alder Lake) was huge, particularly with the split between performance and efficiency cores. ROG overclockers could internally reach single-core frequencies as high as 8.2 GHz with Alder Lake, but enabling more cores drastically reduced maximum overhead, and this is especially true of the e-cores.
So when ASUS overclockers froze a 12th Gen CPU with liquid helium, they turned off the e-cores to see just how far the p-cores could go. During an intense validation run in early October, ‘elmor’ clocked in at 7543.95 MHz on all performance cores with an Intel Core i9-12900K processor socketed into a ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboard. In that same session, ‘elmor’ also shaved the PiFast world record down to just over eight seconds, and ‘safedisk’ turned the e-cores back on to take 16-core first places in Cinebench R20 and Geekbench 3.
Since then, ‘safedisk’ has made many more achievements with both Intel Core i9-12900K and i5-12600K processors. Running both platforms through a gauntlet of all-core and p-core-only runs has brought him 16 global and hardware first-place scores across a variety of benchmarks: Cinebench R20, Geekbench 3, GPUPI for CPU, HWBot x265, and y-cruncher.
One of the records that the most eyes are on this generation is seeing how fast DDR5 memory can be driven. Overclocker ‘Hocayu’ showed just that by tuning a G.Skill DIMM all the way up to 8704 MT/s, handily exceeding even the best clocks reached on the venerable DDR4 standard.
Last, but certainly not least, ‘Rauf’ and the ‘OGS’ team brought their 3D benchmarking prowess again this generation, dominating across the 3DMark suite and in Unigine Heaven. In the process, eight world records were broken, including several scores those very overclockers set on legacy benchmarks with Rocket Lake. All of the records and first place scores are shown below for reference. Note that the asymmetrical core structures required some changes to overclocking scorekeeping. Starting with this generation, validation and ranking site HWbot decided to track records on hybrid chips both for their full core amount as well as performance cores only. As such, for the multi-core benchmarks, results are broken down as follows:

• Intel Core i9-12900K benchmarks are separated into all-core (16x) and p-core only (8x) categories.
• Intel Core i5-12600K benchmarks are similarly separated into all-core (10x) and p-core (6x) categories.