z690 D4 Motherboard experience thread

[TheHig]

Hello everyone. The idea here is to create a thread for posting and discussing experiences with z690 DDR4 boards. I see a lot of discussion pertaining to ram challenges , overclocking, temperature concerns and so on. What kind of ram are you running ? What speeds are you getting ? How is performance/stability? Mobo? Bios version? Win 10 ? Win 11? Cooling setup? .. Things like that or anything else people run into or want to post.

My early experiences so far have been positive but not without some challenges on the z690 Tuf D4 wifi. I have 4x8 sticks of Team Dark Pro 3200 c14 b die ram that absolutely will not run stable at the advertised timings on this board with the 12700k I have. Choosing XMP 1 or 2 or manually putting in primary timings results in some CTD in games or random hard locks just browsing and watching YouTube etc. These are single rank sticks and work very will at the advertised rating on my x570 Unify and a Ryzen 3600 so I'm chalking it up to the D4 needing some bios work running 4 sticks at c14 or worse the IMC on the 12700k doesn't like it. I'm leaning more towards the bios needing more improvements though. Dropping them down to c16 fixes all the problems and runs fine on the z690. However C16 3200 is vanilla as hell and you can get 32GB of that for 100 bucks if you want and running spendy b die like that seems lame.

SOooo..

I pulled the 2x16 kit of Crucial Ballistix c16 3600 out of my itx 5600x box and gave those a shot. Long story short no issues at all with plugging in the timings and voltage manually and they are rock solid at the settings in the screenshot below. Games are rocking, system is snappy and I'm going to run these for the foreseeable future. I'm tempted to pick up a low latency GSkill kit like c14 3600 or c16 4000 in the same 2x16 configuration but that stuff is pushing $240 a kit and I'm not sure it would be a massive increase from what I'm getting from this Crucial set at $169 (what I paid for it this past summer).

 

[Koldur]

Did you change voltages on the memory controller to run 3600 at gear 1? I cannot get my 12700K at 3600 at gear 1 on stock voltages.

 

[kirbyrj]

I have my RAM running at 3600 Gear 1 on a 12900k on stock voltage (1.35V RAM).

 

[TheHig]

Same ^^. I haven’t touched the cpu settings other than “ enforce all limits “ which runs it at Intel spec instead of the bios moving voltages around. So no Asus multi core enhancement and so on.

 

[Koldur]

Then I might have been unlucky in the silicon lottery... Will play around next week, will have vacation then and will report back.
RAM voltage shouldn't have anything to do with gears, as that is dependent on the memory controller kirbyrj

 

[Dan_D]

Hello everyone. The idea here is to create a thread for posting and discussing experiences with z690 DDR4 boards. I see a lot of discussion pertaining to ram challenges , overclocking, temperature concerns and so on. What kind of ram are you running ? What speeds are you getting ? How is performance/stability? Mobo? Bios version? Win 10 ? Win 11? Cooling setup? .. Things like that or anything else people run into or want to post.

My early experiences so far have been positive but not without some challenges on the z690 Tuf D4 wifi. I have 4x8 sticks of Team Dark Pro 3200 c14 b die ram that absolutely will not run stable at the advertised timings on this board with the 12700k I have. Choosing XMP 1 or 2 or manually putting in primary timings results in some CTD in games or random hard locks just browsing and watching YouTube etc. These are single rank sticks and work very will at the advertised rating on my x570 Unify and a Ryzen 3600 so I'm chalking it up to the D4 needing some bios work running 4 sticks at c14 or worse the IMC on the 12700k doesn't like it. I'm leaning more towards the bios needing more improvements though. Dropping them down to c16 fixes all the problems and runs fine on the z690. However C16 3200 is vanilla as hell and you can get 32GB of that for 100 bucks if you want and running spendy b die like that seems lame.

SOooo..

I pulled the 2x16 kit of Crucial Ballistix c16 3600 out of my itx 5600x box and gave those a shot. Long story short no issues at all with plugging in the timings and voltage manually and they are rock solid at the settings in the screenshot below. Games are rocking, system is snappy and I'm going to run these for the foreseeable future. I'm tempted to pick up a low latency GSkill kit like c14 3600 or c16 4000 in the same 2x16 configuration but that stuff is pushing $240 a kit and I'm not sure it would be a massive increase from what I'm getting from this Crucial set at $169 (what I paid for it this past summer).

View attachment 423457

I wouldn't worry about buying ultra low latency stuff for an Intel CPU based system. Intel CPU's have never seemed to benefit from it a whole lot compared to their AMD counterparts.

 

[Captain Newmackwa]

My 12700K and Z690 TUF D4 have been running great so far. I haven't encountered any issues and I was able to get it up and running fairly quickly because I just transferred the SSD with the existing Win 11 installation to the Z690 and replaced the old mobo drivers with the relevant drivers for the Z690 TUF D4. I also recently installed the latest 0807 BIOS and no problems to report on that front.

I'm temporarily running the 12700K on intel stock settings with XMP II Gear 1 for my existing Gskill 32GB 3200 CL16 RAM until I get enough free time and motivation to properly OC and do stability tests. Good thing that this time, the ASUS UEFI Intel stock settings actually follow the Intel spec more closely and the default voltages aren't excessive as with my experience with previous boards. Temps for the VRM and PCH are quite low and CPU is idling at 33C right now. At load, it goes up to the low 70C range in CB23 with an Arctic LFII 360 AIO.

Before to the upgrade while I was on the old mobo and CPU, ever since I installed my 3080 Ti a few months ago and more recently, upping the CPU vcore to try to address system stability issues that have developed over time, I started having the occasional VGA POST errors, but lately, that's been happening more frequently. This is apparently a known issue with 30-series cards with some configurations. Based on solutions I found on Google, I disabled CSM in the UEFI and installed the VBIOS firmware fix from Nvidia but the VGA still wouldn't reliably initialize on post. Another thing I noticed is that while my 3080 Ti is undervolted and slightly underclocked, the Timespy scores I was getting was far lower than the average for similar systems. At first I thought it was the GPU that was the problem so I was contemplating on an RMA for it but I was hesitating because who knows how long it would take to get a replacement in the current situation, and then Intel 12th gen came along and I took a chance with that since it seemed like a compelling upgrade at the time.

Timespy 12700K vs. 9900K

Well, with the new CPU and Mobo, all those issues are thankfully gone. I could've spent a lot of time and frustration troubleshooting but I can't be bothered with that right now and I just need a PC that I can use now. I honestly wasn't expecting much of a gain coming form the 9900K when it comes to gaming performance and day-to-day computing tasks but the game frame-rates did in fact go up probably because whatever issues I was having that was holding the GPU back have been resolved and general Windows and app use feels faster and more responsive now. As expected, the multi-threaded apps I use like WinRAR and GIMP photo editor process stuff quicker than before.

Disregarding DDR5 and going with DDR4, it all went unexpectedly smoothly considering that with all the new tech that 12th gen launched with, so many things could have gone wrong and I was anticipating teething issues going into this. Overall, I'm quite pleased I took the plunge.

 

[kirbyrj]

I bought the Asus ROG Strix Z690-A D4. So far, so good. I reused my old Hynix CJR 3600 memory. So far, I have it running 1:1 and 1T command rate Cas 16 on a 12900k. No issues.