CPU Frequency, Power, and Temperatures
The information below is taken from HWInfo64, which takes the information from motherboard and CPU sensors. A 10 minutes loop of Cinebench R23 was used to load the system.
One thing that’s very interesting about the BIOSTAR Racing Z690 GTA when looking at the power data in HWInfo64 is that the board defaults to the unlimited PL1 Power Limit value of 4095w. If you reset the UEFI to optimized values, this is what you’ll get. Interestingly, this also lead to the CPU pulling additional power that it didn’t need to which didn’t result in a higher clock speed but did give us higher temperatures. Using automatic voltages, I saw temperatures of 100c frequently, though it didn’t report throttling in HWInfo64.
The CPU clocks are the average we saw during the Cinebench R23 loop and the maximum reported clocks shown in HWInfo64 during that test. Interestingly enough, the power settings had no discernable impact on the clock speeds either way. There were some temperature and power differences but no impact on clocks beyond a run to run variance.
As stated above, the temperatures were borderline. While no throttling occurred, it was obviously close to it. For this testing, all I had available was a 280mm AIO with the proper LGA 1700 mounting bracket. Even at full speed on the pump and fans, the 12900K is too much for the little AIO with no power limits. You can use an AIO with the 12900K, but tuning and even undervolting may be a good idea to keep temps in check. It’s worth noting that the Maximus Z690 Extreme test system didn’t run this hot under custom cooling and provided similar clocks and power consumption.