Hi everyone. Thanks for reading. I want to start off just by noting that I know I probably don't need to do any of this, but I was interested in what was possible so here we are.
I am running the following rig:
This all seems fine. In this mode I get cinebench scores of ~3640 and the system seems very stable under my regular use for a few months.
Venturing into using Ryzen Master to tweak the all-core clock speeds I seem to hit a hard limit at 4.25 GHz stable. Setting it to 4.3 GHz leads to a pretty rapid failure during P95 up to voltages that I'm prepared to try (more on this below).
At all core clocks of 4.25 GHz, with a "Peak Core(s) Voltage" setting of 1.325 V I seem pretty stable. Under full load in P95 of cinebench the cores sit drawing 1.29 V each and my temps peak around 75 C. Cinebench scores go up a bit, and I can get to just shy of 3800. However, here lies my first question. When I am idling in Windows with these settings, HWMonitor shows each core still drawing the max setting of 1.325V. I'm assuming this is usual, as the system is no longer using any kind of boosting and is just sitting at the values I've given it - is that a correct assumption?
If so, this leads me on to my more pertinent question - what's a value that I can put in the "Peak Core(s) Voltage" setting that I can be confident shouldn't lead to any major degradation in the lifespan of my CPU compared to the default boost option? I understand any increased voltage is bad for CPU life, but I imagine this is a distinctly non-linear trend and there must be a level of "safe compromise"?
All in all, if I can't go much above 4.25 GHz all-core, and I don't do a lot of multi-core operations, I imagine I'm best off sticking with default settings for most of my gaming needs. The single core boosts to even higher clock speeds are probably more beneficial?
Any thoughts or guidance gratefully received as I haven't done any serious overclocking since I ran a 1 GHz thunderbird at 1.4 GHz for years
EDIT: It turns out I had made some mistakes in the above, which I would like to clarify here:
I didn't have the latest p95 (there were no AVX settings anywhere!), so I've updated that. Secondly, I can't tell what the PBO scalar was during a "stock run" because I was using Ryzen Master rather than the BIOS directly to set it.
With those things in mind I have done a bunch of things to confirm my original results, i.e. enabled PBO 1X manually in the BIOS, get HWInfo to ensure I'm reading voltages correctly, and updated p95. This image shows both HWMonitor, HWInfo, and p95 running a small FFTs test with these settings, and ensuring that the "disable AVX2" box is not checked. https://imgur.com/sWk03QA
Unless I'm missing something I appear to be sitting at 1.31V, 4GHz all core boost, and the temps are notably higher than before - hitting 86 C.
My questions from the main post above, still stand! Thanks
I am running the following rig:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600X cooled by Coolermaster Masterliquid 240 AIO watercooling
- Asus Prime X370-Pro (Socket AM4) DDR4 ATX (latest BIOS revision, 5220)
- Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 (3200MHz) @3200 MHz, 16-18-18-36-1T, 1.35 V (DOCP 3200)
- Zotac nVidia GeForce RTX 2080 8GB (I know... I couldn't afford a Ti when I built this)
- Windows 10 on Samsung SM961 Polaris 256GB M.2 PCI-e SSD
This all seems fine. In this mode I get cinebench scores of ~3640 and the system seems very stable under my regular use for a few months.
Venturing into using Ryzen Master to tweak the all-core clock speeds I seem to hit a hard limit at 4.25 GHz stable. Setting it to 4.3 GHz leads to a pretty rapid failure during P95 up to voltages that I'm prepared to try (more on this below).
At all core clocks of 4.25 GHz, with a "Peak Core(s) Voltage" setting of 1.325 V I seem pretty stable. Under full load in P95 of cinebench the cores sit drawing 1.29 V each and my temps peak around 75 C. Cinebench scores go up a bit, and I can get to just shy of 3800. However, here lies my first question. When I am idling in Windows with these settings, HWMonitor shows each core still drawing the max setting of 1.325V. I'm assuming this is usual, as the system is no longer using any kind of boosting and is just sitting at the values I've given it - is that a correct assumption?
If so, this leads me on to my more pertinent question - what's a value that I can put in the "Peak Core(s) Voltage" setting that I can be confident shouldn't lead to any major degradation in the lifespan of my CPU compared to the default boost option? I understand any increased voltage is bad for CPU life, but I imagine this is a distinctly non-linear trend and there must be a level of "safe compromise"?
All in all, if I can't go much above 4.25 GHz all-core, and I don't do a lot of multi-core operations, I imagine I'm best off sticking with default settings for most of my gaming needs. The single core boosts to even higher clock speeds are probably more beneficial?
Any thoughts or guidance gratefully received as I haven't done any serious overclocking since I ran a 1 GHz thunderbird at 1.4 GHz for years
EDIT: It turns out I had made some mistakes in the above, which I would like to clarify here:
I didn't have the latest p95 (there were no AVX settings anywhere!), so I've updated that. Secondly, I can't tell what the PBO scalar was during a "stock run" because I was using Ryzen Master rather than the BIOS directly to set it.
With those things in mind I have done a bunch of things to confirm my original results, i.e. enabled PBO 1X manually in the BIOS, get HWInfo to ensure I'm reading voltages correctly, and updated p95. This image shows both HWMonitor, HWInfo, and p95 running a small FFTs test with these settings, and ensuring that the "disable AVX2" box is not checked. https://imgur.com/sWk03QA
Unless I'm missing something I appear to be sitting at 1.31V, 4GHz all core boost, and the temps are notably higher than before - hitting 86 C.
My questions from the main post above, still stand! Thanks
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After a few days of testing, I figured I could get an all core clock of about 4.2 GHz that seemed stable enough, the issue being at the cost of voltage. All in all I weighed my options and decided sticking with PBO was better - you still get single core boosts to 4.4 GHz when needed, and it'll still boost all cores to 4.1 GHz as well but when you're not using much it clocks down and sits with nice cool/low voltages which I feel is far better for the chip long term. Overall, yes, clockable, but no, not really worth it. For me that is.... YMMV.