Overclocking the 12900K on any Z690 board will be quite a straightforward affair just like any Intel CPUs before but the balance of maintaining temperatures would be the challenge. That said, it will be very challenging to cool this CPU regardless of any solution and that means that the majority of motherboards around will not really add anything to change that. ASUS does arm the PRIME Z690-A with the lot of OC knobs found commonly in their higher-end boards like precise per-core control and the hybrid CPU architecture means its sometimes beneficial to just disable E-cores. Intel does allow this and this board has options to do that. Still, on all cores, getting a stable OC would be purely based on luck on the silicon lottery and how cool your CPU is. ASUS’ AI OC keeps recommending 5.4Ghz on this CPU on the P-cores but due to the temp wall, we’re forced to reduce the CPU multiplier to 5.2Ghz. E-cores are stable at 4.1Ghz but AI OC also sets it to 4.3Ghz. I tried disabling all but one P-Core to see if I can push the E-cores further but BSOD already starts at 4.2Ghz.
The screenshot above is a wPrime load on a 5.2Ghz OC but the CPU drops to 4.9Ghz shortly after it starts as throttling kicks in.
What does it mean that this is not gaming board? What does it miss?
It states that it “not a gaming or creator motherboard… and that is fine” which means its not particularly geared for both BUT honestly, it works well for either. Board makers tune gaming boards for higher performance e.g. higher boosts versus Intel stock but that’s pretty marginal. Other than that, not so much in “gamer”-ey features like a ton of RGB connectors and boosted audio or LAN.