A little help? 8Pack Elite Tier ASUS ROG Strix Z490-I Overclocked i9 10900K 5.0GHz Gaming Bundle

Stufish · 2 Mar 2026 at 10:09

HI All,

I purchased the 8Pack Elite Tier ASUS ROG Strix Z490-I Overclocked i9 10900K 5.0GHz Gaming Bundle in 2020.

The system has been running flawlessly. I noticed a little fall in performance, so I decided to check the CPU benchmark, which reported the stock values rather than the 5.0 GHz overclock.

I reloaded the 8-pack saved BIOS settings in case the BIOS has reset to defaults somewhere, and now my PC won't boot to Windows. I tried the repair and reset to no avail.

While frustrating, and a Windows reinstall isn't the end of the world, and I manage my files and data, so it's non-disruptive.

My question is, how can I be sure I'm at the optimal overclock setting, and back to the 8pack preconfigured? I'm finding the BIOS hard to read and understand.

aaronyuri · 2 Mar 2026 at 10:39

You shouldn't need to reinstall Windows. Is secure boot enabled or disabled?

What did you use to confirm CPU clock speeds?

Stufish · 2 Mar 2026 at 13:01

aaronyuri said:
You shouldn't need to reinstall Windows. Is secure boot enabled or disabled?

What did you use to confirm CPU clock speeds?

Hey aaronyuri,

Thanks for responding, I used PassMark to run the test, thats what reported the base speed on the single thread test.

I will checked the secure boot, and as I said, this BIOS is confusing. Nowhere can I find secure boot on/off; all it has is other/windows.

Glanza · 2 Mar 2026 at 14:17

Look for CSM and enable / disable it and see if boots.

Stufish · 2 Mar 2026 at 14:30

Glanza said:
Look for CSM and enable / disable it and see if boots.

I will thanks

mickyflinn · 2 Mar 2026 at 16:52

Call Overclockers I'm sure they will help you out .

Stufish · 2 Mar 2026 at 16:58

mickyflinn said:
Call Overclockers I'm sure they will help you out .

Yeah, I think it will come to that. I updated the firmware to see if something had got corrupted, reinstalled Windows, and now I have a bunch more problems.

Skynet5 · Tuesday at 05:13

Hmm did you reset bios to defaults as the 8pack settings appeared to cause the issue? Or did you just jump in to flashing firmware and repairing windows?