ASRock Z690 AQUA

Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking

Review Video of the retail Version inculding “Real World” Benchmarks down below!

Video tutorial on liquid nitrogen (LN2) overclocking the 12900k to 6.8GHz on the ASRock AQUA

…as the title already suggests this article is all about liquid nitrogen overclocking on the ASRock Z690 AQUA. This guide will apply to every 12th generation Intel cpu and not specifically to the i9. We will use the i9 to showcase the overclocking capabilities of this board and not because we do not have any other cpu right now.

First of all a brief overview of the topics we will discuss:

Preperation
LN2 Overclocking
Troubleshooting

after reading all this you should have a solid basis to go cold with your AQUA. Let us get startet now.

Preperation

A good preperation is key when attempting to hunt for records. Nothing is more frustrating than having to stop because of problems. Therefore we give a short overview on the most important steps before actually going cold.

As you can see on the picture on right hand side you should insulate your board. A good insulation will prevent you from having problems caused by condensation which will occur over time. We use liquid rubber to insulate our boards. Liquid rubber is easy to apply and easy to remove.

Besides insulating the board the usage of a heating backplate is a great help. It will prevent ice building up around the socket and the memory.

There are still a lot more measure you can and should take but those are the most important ones. Now lets get to main part.

LN2 Overclocking

The AQUA has all the neccessary features to make LN2 overlocking easy. Let us take a close look at the board and the helpful features it comes with:

BCLK Up / Down Buttons
BFG /Safe boot
RTY / Retry
Start
Reset
Q-Code Display

As you might have noticed there are some other buttons as the numerized ones and two more switches - more on those later.

Button Nr .1.

The green highlighted buttons are BCLK up and down buttons. Those come in handy when running e.g. Geekbench. You can adjust the frequency up during the easy parts and down during hard parts of the specific benchmark. This is very useful because it does not require the use of a tool which would harm performance. One press of a buttin will increase / decrease the BCLK by 0.1. The buttons can be configuired in the bios to also increase / decrease the cpu ratio by one per press.

Button NR. 3

This button is the Retry button. It will reset your system when the normal reset button does not work anymore. Basically it functions as PSU off and on. It will always result in the system trying to restart again.

Button Nr.4 & 5

Those are the start and reset buttons. If you need an explanation of this you should not have this board!

The numerized buttons load profiles which are stored in the BIOS. However they require a reboot which is not always optimal during extreme overclocking and we thus do not use them. However those are great for daily overclocking to switch between profiles. The Switches are the LN2-mode and the Slow-mode. The LN2 mode is not required and thus can be left disabled.

Button Nr 2.

The yellow highlighted BFG button is extremely useful when working on memory profiles. It is like the safe boot button on ASUS / Limp mode on Gigabyte boards.

A press of this button will take you staight into the bios without deleting your bios settings. It does so by loading defaults but it does not override your bios settings like a cmos clear would do.

NR. 6 Q-code

This is a normal and well functioning Q-Code display. It will display information during the boot of the system.

The Slow-mode will result the cpu running at its lowest possible multiplier. This may be useful when you need to safe LN2.

Getting started:

Now that we covered all the imortant details about the board let us get to the interesting part.

After mounting your LN2 pot and setting everything up you should first load a daily overclock to and then go into the OS to check if your mount is good. We do this by checking the core temperature during a cinebench run. If all cores have about the same temperature your mount seems to be good and you can start. Start by going down to -120°C to -130°C and enter the BIOS.