OVERCLOCKED AMD RYZEN 7 PERFORMANCE GUIDE
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,531 words · ~7 min read
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so you've been waiting for AMD ryzen now
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you've seen what it can do you're ready to do your best impression of Philip J
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fry but wait AMD has left the keys in
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the proverbial ignition and decided to
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keep their frequency multipliers unlocked so could you potentially save
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yourself a hundred bucks going for the
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1700x instead of the 1800x and get the
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same performance I always recommend that before you start
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haggling with your local CPU dealer you
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take her out for a test drive so let's do that then shall we Welcome to our AMD
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ryzen 7 overclocking
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Guide G fuel is the sugar-free energy drink formula that can help you maintain
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Focus during long work dayss and gaming sessions use offer code Linus to save
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40% for a limited time so since we don't have to spend
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extra on a special unlocked CPU to
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enable overclocking we can use any
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motherboard with an AMD x370 or b350
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chipset like our x370 based ASUS Crosshair 6 cool but what CPU should we
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buy well AMD's own guidance indicates
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that non-x chips aren't expected to
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overclock as well so The Logical course
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of action appears to be to just crank up
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the clocks on a 1700x and save ourselves a cnote but is
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it really going to be that easy in theory yes but it's complicated by the
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fact that ryzen doesn't give you very
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much control while you do have dead
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simple access to change the multiplier and the base clock the means by which
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the clock speed or frequency of a CPU is
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derived both in the BIOS and in AMD's
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ryzen master software you can't
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simultaneously enable AMD's automatic
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turbo functionality Precision boost
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ryzen immediately locks to the clock speed and voltage that you set meaning
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that if you want to actually match the potential of an 1800x your 1700x will
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have to be able to do up to 4.1 GHz all
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day long not an easy task considering
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even the 1800x will only hit 4.1 with
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xfr under certain workloads out of the box so let's get down to it then and see
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if our 1700x has what it takes using our
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usual ryzen bench and a 1080ti we'll Venture first into the BIOS for for the
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greatest degree of control simply by
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setting the multiplier to 40 and the vcor voltage to
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1.375 we managed a stable overclock of 4
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GHz over the 1700 X's stock 3.4 GHz base
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frequency not bad for a CPU that's only
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supposed to boost to 3.9 using
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xfr sadly though we couldn't push any
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further even if we cranked the voltage to
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AMD's recommended maximum of 1.45 volts
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we're not sure why this is exactly but even when we dove into more advanced
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base clock overclocking we were only able to eek out an extra 100 MHz on the
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CPU not really worth the time or effort
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the same was true of our 1800x which tells us that at least for our chips the
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limiting factor may be elsewhere
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armed with this knowledge we now know the relevant voltages and frequencies we
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need in order to perform an overclock first the CPU multiplier shown in our
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BIOS as CPU core ratio this works in
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increments of 0.25 and by default ranges from 22 to
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63.75 You'll generally want to ignore
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custom CPU core ratio but if you do use
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it you'll be greeted by a multiplier called fi ID and a divider called did
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which go from 16 to 255 and 8 to 48
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respectively to be clear the only reason
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you would want this kind of control is if you were base clock overclocking so
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you can access it with AI overclock tuner but quite frankly we don't really
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recommend it because it adjusts other sensitive system frequencies like PCI
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Express for no realworld performance
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benefit one useful thing you can do with
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the AI overclock tuner is set what ASUS calls docp which is fancy talk for Dr
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overclock profiles like Intel's
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XMP now in the future you'll be able to use this to set your high-speed RAM to
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the correct frequency and timings automatically which is key because ryzen
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really does seem to perform better the higher you can crank the memory speed
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and the lower you can get the timings
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but bear in mind that most RAM right now
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is tuned for Intel platforms so you'll need to shop for special memory to be
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able to take advantage of this
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and we actually didn't have a ton of success running even the memory that AMD
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provided or one of these AMD specific memory kits any higher than 2666
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megahertz so your mileage May
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significantly vary as far as that goes
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in any case it's likely you'll end up manually keying in your RAM timings to
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get them as low as you can before hitting a wall moving on to voltages our
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main concern is V cor shown here as CPU
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core voltage by default when you set an overclock ryzen will snap to a rather
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strange arbitrary voltage of
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13625 as for what to set it to we found
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that 1.375 is the sweet spot for overclocking
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with high-end air cooling while ASUS recommends no higher than 1. 1425 with
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strong liquid cooling drram voltage
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defaults to 1.2 but most higher end kits
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are asking for about 1.35 if you do adjust this you'll want
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to tweak the CPU s so voltage whose
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default is 0.99 turning this voltage up can improve
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memory overclocking and for us did seem to help with stability you'll also want
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to set your memory termination voltage in our case labeled VT DDR in Tweakers
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Paradise to half of your Dam voltage if
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you're trying out base clock overclocks then you can also find Sensi skew here
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which you'll want to enable Force stability though again we really don't
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recommend this pH okay so we're overclocked how
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does it run well thanks to the Crosshair 6's am3 mounting holes we can test not
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only our am4 based Noctua u12s and
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Cooler Master hyper 212 plus but also our Corsair h100i all-in-one water
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cooler so we can give you guys a good idea of what to expect pretty much
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across the board for temperatures under Ida 64's stability test our hyper 212
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plus managed 82° which I would consider to be acceptable while our Noctua ran at
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83 .5 so that's warmer but it should be
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noted that this was with a much quieter fan our h100i meanwhile managed to keep
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things down to a cozy 74 1
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12° if you want to compare these results to your own bear in mind that currently
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AMD's ryzen X Series CPUs are reporting
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temperatures a whole 20° higher than they actually are in some applications
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we took our readings from AMD's own ryzen Master software though so they
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should be accurate as for performance at
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4 GHz our 1700x sits at the top of the
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x-class rise and lineup for FPS per dollar at 1080p a likely Target for all
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of you out there buying High refresh rate monitors games like DSX mankind
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divided rise of the Tomb Raider for Honor GTA 5 and doom all showed close or
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better performance synthetics like like 7zip PC Mark y cruncher cinebench and
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real bench all showed the overclock mostly meeting or exceeding the 1800x
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sometimes by a wide margin so combining
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these scores and average FPS well it
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gets extremely close to the core i7 7700
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K's performance per dollar in many ways actually the
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overclocked ryzen 7 1700x reminds me of
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the XP 2500 plus it wasn't the fastest
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CPU on the market but it was fast enough
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for most uses and could be counted on to consistently overclock about as high as
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AMD's topof the line and more expensive
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3200 plus back then on top of that like
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the 2500 plus it's priced just right for
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a wide range of users consumers
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prosumers and Gamers so in short while
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some enthusiasts might have hoped that ryzen
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would overclock like a bat out of hell and be a return to the Athlon 64 in X2
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days with AMD on top of the performance Heap that isn't what we got but hey a
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chance to relive the Athlon XP days
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that's not too shabby either so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked
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you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button maybe consider checking out where
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to buy your own ryen CPU and motherboard
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at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store and
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our community forum both of which you should totally check out