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The efficiency comes into play when you're running a higher end chip as the less efficient the VRM, the more heat it produces delivering the power to the CPU, and if the VRM overheats the system will crash or it'll throttle the CPU. That's the issue with some of the cheap boards, they can power...

Yeah, some of the sub £200 boards cannot properly handle the 3950x or any 8+ core overclocked but the Tuf would. It's just not as efficient as some of the most expensive boards.

The Tuf is a good board, decent enough VRM for the 3900x and the same they use all the way up to the £300 boards. The only downside is Realtek LAN, but if you want Intel you can get a PCI-E card for about £15.

Going above 1800MHz IF with decent timings seems to help games that are sensitive to latency quite a lot (i.e. ones that the 9900K is ahead in), but doesn't seem to help in productivity work.

Seems like a decent chip. Now try your memory at 3800MHz and IF at 1900MHz :) That RAM will do it fine.

Are the ones shipping the same stepping as the review chips?

Hardware Unboxed went most of the way by comparing 3600MHz RAM on the 3900x with PBO enabled vs the 9900K at 5GHz (also 3600MHz RAM), that's where the average 5% or so lead across 36 games for the 9900K comes from. Now this test shows how much you can gain by just manually tuning the memory, but...

In this price range the best board is the Asus Strix-E, which ocuk doesn't sell. It has basically the same VRM as the Hero, which is hugely more expensive and uses the best parts from Asus. It's weird regional pricing - in the USA the Strix-E is basically the same price as the Hero, but here...

Yeah I'd heard that memory tuning on Intel doesn't do much. It looks like if you tuned 3600MHz memory, which basically all 3900x can do fine, and then compared with the 9900K at 5GHz the gaming results would overall come out with the 3900X on top, with some games 10-20% faster.

They don't compare the 9900K in that benchmark, but as it was only about 3fps ahead at very high quality settings, it's likely the 3900X with tuned memory is very comfortably ahead of the 9900K at 5GHz -- not totally fair as the Intel wasn't tuned, but I don't think it gains much at all from it.

Hardware unboxed's vid today is showing that manually tuning RAM can make a bigger difference in games than just clock rate where it's CPU limited.

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers? It fixes problems with boost ramping up too quickly causing things like this.

I'm talking about boost (PB) not PBO. The boost clocks they put on the box are what would have been silicon lottery on Zen+ but now they're stated as the official boost. 4.35GHz is above the stated boost clock of the 2700x.

Much of it is just marketing. With Zen and Zen+ the max boost was what you expected, now they're stating it as something you might get sometimes or might not even get at all. They've basically just rated the boost clocks too high on all the desktop parts to make them sound better.

It's not worth it, you could have got a 3900x for that much extra. Since there's so little overclocking headroom it's just something to play with for some gains here and there.

Yeah we're not talking huge gains anyway, in a lot of cases it'd be less than 2% and in some nothing at all. Maybe later firmware will help with getting it stable at 1833MHz or something though.

Ouch, must be very bad luck since 1800MHz isn't even over clocked. AMD even recommends 1866MHz.

It's much better to run 3800 C16 / 1900 IF than to be 3600 C14 / 1800 IF because the IF increase far outweighs the timings.

You regularly see stuff like 14 16 16 30, so the two middle numbers the same or slightly higher than the first, and the last one around double the first. There are loads of other timings of course.

Ouch, expensive.