AMD made a big splash when we got our hands on 3rd gen ryzen and confirmed
what they already told us that team blue needs to go back to the
drawing board and while they're there maybe they can unlock all their cpus
like AMD has on ryzen and while it may still be early days for
zen 2 let's take a look at how we can make the most of team red's generosity
since the first generation back in 2017 ryzen hasn't been known for being able
to clock up much further than what you get out of the box none of our top-end
chips would go much higher than a couple hundred megahertz at best and many of
you reported the same of course while this sounds like a raw
deal for overclockers who happen to be AMD fans it's not all bad news because
precision boost and xfr helped automatically gain a bit more performance without any tweaking
required so long as you had a good enough cooler and if you're so inclined
you can set up AMD's automatic overclocking called precision boost
overdrive and call it a day you'll get a mild performance boost up to about 200
megahertz if you're really lucky and dial in the power limits just right but
in my experience chances are it won't get you very far and the slightly more
involved method of just entering the BIOS bumping up the voltage and choosing
a specific multiplier like on Intel likely won't get you a very stable
system so you'd be forgiven for using precision boost overdrive and just
calling it a day but that's not why you're here is it let's dive in
there are some things that make the 3rd gen ryzen overclocking experience
a little more interesting than previous generations
the most obvious being the ryzen 9 3900x
and its multiple dies called ccds like threadripper they communicate with each
other over the super fast infinity fabric but unlike threadripper the dies
are physically much closer together for much lower latency and appear as a
single physical CPU to the operating system for overclocking purposes they
are separated from each other in other words thanks to the silicon lottery
chances are you'll end up with one die capable of overclocking much further
than another which means an all-core overclock becomes a tricky proposition
one you don't necessarily want if you're after the most performance you can
muster enter per ccx overclocking a concept that may feel a little familiar
to x299 platform overclockers using the newest version of ryzen master
you can visually see which compute complexes each representing clusters of
three to four cores are the fastest and second fastest on a per ccd basis with
this information you can target your overclock to be more aggressive on a
given ccx and this is true even of the single ccd ryzen 5 and 7 processors
before we get into the nitty gritty on overclocking the chip itself we need to
talk about memory because it's quite important we've already released a video
explaining where the sweet spot is for third gen ryzen but to summarize the
infinity fabric's own separate clock is tied to the memory speed up until around
1800 megahertz or ddr4 3600 after which
it automatically decouples to allow for faster memory run if you've got a golden
chip you can try your luck by bumping up the speed of the infinity fabric to
match higher speed memory like ddr4 3800 for best possible results overclocking
the infinity fabric with slower memory may also yield good results depending on
the scenario but as a rule it's best to keep it one
to one if possible remember that the actual clock speed of
ddr memory is half of its published rating because it operates twice per
cycle memory overclocking in general is fairly universal but there exists a dram
calculator for ryzen by one usmas that can give you a jumping off point plug in
your platform details memory type and speed and it'll give you some timings
based on what it estimates you can get away with in my experience it doesn't work with
memory faster than 3600 but i've had success using it to help dial in my
timings there's a variable ocean of jargon and
acronyms in here but beyond what the calculator gives you here are some
general tips for high speed memory enable gear down
mode for better stability and disable power down mode
as a general rule i'd suggest adjusting your timings in turn rebooting each time
yeah that's a little tedious but if one of the timings prevents you from booting
skip it move on and then come back and try a higher value until you're stable
this is all worth the trouble because this really does matter for
gaming on ryzen finally some have observed that a high memory frequency
and infinity fabric frequency can impact your CPU overclocking range so it might
be worth saving a second profile with your memory clocked down but with
tighter timings just in case the next important pre-game items are voltages
which factor heavily into heat output as we alluded to in our review and as
steve over at gamer's next has discovered with his cold performance test
keeping temperatures low is imperative for getting better performance out of
ryzen since most of you won't be chilling your ryzen cpus below ambient
you'll want to know what voltages you can safely lower before we begin
tweaking i'd recommend starting out by manually changing every voltage you can
to its stock value not automatic here are the relevant
voltages we'll be tweaking today depending on your goals you might be
able to lower most of these and be okay or you might need to keep them at least
at stock to keep your oc going it might sound weird because you might think you
need more voltage for better performance but verizon stability at higher
frequencies relies heavily on thermal performance
so the lower you can go the better if you do have to turn them up i'd
recommend staying within five to ten percent above the stock value to be on
the safe side many of these voltages are pretty straightforward you've got the memory
voltage which is typically managed by memory profiles and you'll only really
want to modify these if you're overclocking your RAM
you've got the soc voltage that manages the encore consisting of the cache and
the i o die which can be helpful in overclocking the infinity fabric and
gaining that last bit of RAM or CPU overclocking stability and of course
there's the CPU or core voltage which you'd ideally want to top out at 1.35
volts unless you have a cooler capable of more than 150 watts of heat
dissipation like a Noctua u12s or a 240
to 280 millimeter aio yes i know the stock is higher and on
that note if you're seeing strangely high voltages and monitoring apps like
hw info it's not your imagination if a
core is parked which means it is essentially asleep most tools right now
will only report the last known voltage and frequency before that happened which
after a benchmark may be very high ryzen master will show you the true state of
each core it's worth noting at this point that undervolting alone can also slightly
improve performance due to how precision boost works as long as you don't go too
low now some voltages are a little less
straightforward and while many of these are typically derived from other
voltages tweaking them can result in better
stability especially if you've modified the voltages they depend on
for example if you've adjusted the soc voltage then the infinity fabric data
voltage can be adjusted lower to compensate if you're having trouble with
memory stability you can adjust the vpp voltage which controls the highest
voltage used for memory access for higher reliability
or the vtt voltage which controls the memory's lowest voltage for signal
integrity most other voltages won't be very relevant to most users and can be
tweaked down but won't significantly alter the thermals in spite of some of
the higher voltages you might see listed next let's go over some of the other
options available to us for overclocking as usual you'll want to increase the
electrical current capability on your motherboard to get the most out of your
oc if your motherboard has decent vrms you'll want to do the same for phase
control and you'll want to set the load line calibration somewhere in the middle
to start off with i'd recommend adjusting these to less aggressive values if possible after you've dialed
in your oc to regain some thermal headroom one final setting related to
phases is the switching frequency higher is typically better but will tax your
vrms even further so if your oc is just
a little unstable you can try adjusting these upward to see if it makes a
difference for you finally send semi skew if present should be enabled for
overclocking now i've spent all this time explaining everything but
overclocking the CPU itself but now we're ready to get our hands dirty while
there's not a lot of fine control afforded by letting precision boost
overdrive drive for better results we'll still want to
use ryzen master because at this time per ccx overclocking doesn't appear to
be an option in the BIOS or at least not on our ASUS or MSI
motherboards now just because ryzen master shows us the fastest and second
fastest cores on each ccx doesn't mean we want to overclock on a
core by core basis because it's actually still the ccx that takes the highest
given clock and assigns it to each core slower cores will be clocked back down
to a preset level if you enter a specific value short of your pure ccx
overclock meaning the user gets no fine control per core even if it seems like
they do in the software speaking of which your motherboard and even your
BIOS revision can and will impact your thermals and how far you can overclock
so it's worth doing a little bit of research before you begin and waiting if
your BIOS is known to be problematic as far as choosing a frequency to start off
with though a good jumping off point would be a middle ground between your
CPU's rated boost and its stock clock
if it's stable great now you can start cranking each ccx in turn to see where
they stop for stability's sake i'd recommend 50 to
100 megahertz below your highest stable clock but that's a matter of taste
in our case here's what we managed on our 3rd gen ryzen 9 7 and 5 processors
performance improvements over stock can go as far as 10 or more depending on the
overclock and the workload although in very light tasks you might actually lose
some performance because your stock per core boost might for a short while be
able to go higher than what you can achieve on all cores but if how
responsive your web browser is were your primary concern you wouldn't really be
overclocking would you either way you need to be able to keep your CPU cool
enough for any of this to matter in the first place not to worry though you can curb some of
that by turning down your voltage and vrm phase settings until you hit a point
where you're no longer stable and then choose a step or two above that
point it'll take some trial and error but with enough determination you can
have your performance per watt cake and eat it too thanks for watching guys if
this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit
that like button or check out the link to where to buy some of the stuff we
featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch
store which has cool shirts like this one i think we have this back in stock
and the hoodie and our community forum which you should
totally join maybe discuss some of your overclocking
secrets