Overclocking

While the Godlike X Edition is less overclocking-focused than Unify-X models, it's still something that might be thrown at the board, either in manual form or through PBO. It's a bit of a shame at this price to not have MSI's Tuning Controller included in the box, as there is a connector for it. The Godlike X Edition is also missing the manual control buttons we've seen on other extreme overclocking boards.


Overclocking is easily accomplished in the EFI, using either PBO-based controls including Curve Optimizer and Curve Shaper, or through a wide selection of manual controls. PBO options are found under the Advanced CPU configuration and then AMD overclocking, and they do include a basic manual control section, but the main overclocking section offers far more options. There didn't appear to be an Eco mode setting, but you can easily achieve the same results using the Config TDP option. The board didn't seem to suffer from vDroop, at least at the settings we used, but loadline calibration is found in the usual place under DigitALL Power. The software also gives you basic overclocking controls over the multiplier as well as key voltages, but AMD Ryzen Master is probably a more effective option if you want to stick with Windows-based overclocking.


As far as overclocking goes, you'll be limited by your cooling long before the board gives out, with a quick manual overclock pushing all cores on our Ryzen 9 9950X to 5.4 GHz with a vCore bump to 1.36 V. This is below the peak boost frequency for smaller numbers of boosted cores on this CPU, but above what it can achieve on its own when boosting all 16 cores and resulted in a small increase to the Cinebench R24 multicore score.