Ryzen abba update

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6 Feb 2019
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Hi. There is a bios update available for my motherboard, It's a new PC, less than a month old and as far as I can tell is running great. I'll put specs below. I've never done a bios update before so I'm wondering if it's worth doing. How you can see if it's improved anything and what risks are involved. Thanks.

Corsair 220T
Rog Strix B450 gaming- F
Ryzen 3700x
Gigabyte 2070 Super
16Gb Corsair 3600Mhz Vengeance
 
After so many horror stories of boards being bricked thanks to a dodgy Bios update I've always been of the opinion 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' and have left well alone.
 
The ABBA firmwares from board manufacturers usually include an updated version of AMD's SMU (the code which governs CPU boost based on power/temperature budget), which allows most processors to reach their rated maximum multiplier.

Most official BIOS updates prior to those based on ABBA use an older SMU which limits many processors to a mulitplier 0.25 to 0.5 below what they were advertised as being capable of.

Check what multiplier/frequency your CPU/board combination is currently reaching when monitoring using HWiNFO for 5-10 minutes. It should briefly/occasionally peak at 44x / ~4400MHz under light loads providing its kept cool enough, but its quite likely you'll only be seeing 43.25-43.75.
If you're not seeing some cores reach x44 occasionally, then the latest update might be worth trying, though it is only a ~1% improvement.

The recent ABBA update for the Asus Prime X470 Pro took my 3600X max multiplier from 43.5 on a couple of cores up to 44 on four cores at the price of an extra 25mV in core voltage when set to Auto (previously peak voltage was 1.45V, now its 1.475V).
It also seems less susceptible to losing performance and peak multiplier from applying a negative offset to the core voltage.

In my case, for my board and processor, yes probably worth the update.
 
I'll be trying Version 2801 "AM4 combo PI 1.0.0.3 patch ABBA" update for my B450-F today and see if it has a good impact on CPU benchmark.
I had noticed my 3700X never really reaching 4.4GHz so hopefully this will help. Will post results.

On a side note, this is my first AMD chip since the old AMD Duron since the early 2000's, all intel since then. The 3700X is a very very worthy processor.

If anyone looking for good RAM for the 3000 Ryzens I can definitly recommend the Team Group 3200 CL14 8 pack RAM, increased my system score all over (CPU, GPU and RAM). I had the Corsair Vengence CL16 3200 LPX pair for a week and it just isn't good enough if you like to run as fast as possible. My old DDR3 2400 Mushkin CL10 beats both of them though mainly in latency (maybe is the memory controller...)
 
I did the update yesterday. I'll be honest there's a lot of info of you guys I don't understand and I'm not sure where to go to see if it made any improvements.

I did do time spy and cinebench before and after for what that was worth. Time spy went from 10050 - 10210. And cinebench went up a bit to 4681 with 491 on single core.
Again. I'm not sure what that means or if it was just a coincidence. But it's done now. And I didn't brick it , so I'm ok with that.
 
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