Review of Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI motherboard with Intel Core i7-9700K coffeelake processor

Overclocking & CPU-Z

Overclocking and CPU-Z

The Core i7-9770K is 14nm processor that has a TDP of 95W. This 8 core 8 threads processor is somewhat a show of Intel’s belief in it’s single thread performance. In fact, it never believed in multi core multithread performance till AMD Ryzen introduced it to the market.

We have tested a number of Ryzen processors in the past 2 years and found out that they can’t go beyond 4.2 GHz on Air cooling. In fact, water cooling may just push it slightly higher by another 100 MHz.

The introduction of the Intel 9th generation seems to foster the idea that Intel is capable of achieving easily at 5 GHz without much of a bump in settings. Well, the earlier generation Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i7-8086k can already push near the 5 GHz limit by upping the voltages.

With the Core i7-9700K, 5 GHz seems an easy task even with air cooling. During our test, we used an engineering sample with a normal cooler. Temperatures went as high as 95 deg C when we ran the processor at 51x multiplier. That makes it run up to a max. of 5.1 GHz.

In fact, the processor’s own turbo max speed is 4.9 GHz. So, running it by setting by default would easily achieve similar scores. 5.1 GHz is just 200 MHz more than the maximum speed in the specifications of the processor.

In our system setup, we used the Gigabyte Z390 AORIS PRO WIFI motherboard and paired it up with 16 GB of (dual stick x 8 GB)  G.Skill memory running at XMP Profile at DDR4-3200 CAS 14, 14,14, 2T.

A simple run of the benchmark built in to CPU-Z shows that the processor runs steadily at 5.1 GHz and CPU single thread wise it beats the reference AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. When it comes to multithread, it is still a 18% behind compared to a Ryzen 7 2700X running at default speed.

Will this result be reflected in other benchmarks, read on. We have included benchmark numbers from our AMD Ryzen Threadripper as these numbers are more recent.