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is there much difference in the good ol stable overclock?
so for hours i tried to overclock my ram on asus 470f, ryzen 3600x and corsair vengeance lpx 16gb 3200mhz. So finally i decided to use the D.O.C.P setting and it set my memory to 3200 vs 2133 and and its timings. i then used the ez option for cpu overclock to get it to 4.0 ghz. Is this obviously better than what it had a default, and should i be trying to get them to where they need to be per ryzen dram calculator? Is there a massive difference?
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If you want to overclock Ryzen 3600X you can try doing it with settings called PBO (precision boost overdrive) and autoOC, but generally it's not really worth it.
The PBO alogorithm is heavily tied to cooling - so the better you can cool the chip, the faster and more consistently PBO will boost your clocks.
RAM overclocking can gain you a bit - the AMD chipsets don't do that so well. Sounds like you are hitting the rated speed on your DIMMS, ymmv on trying to eek out much past that.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3491-explaining-precision-boost-overdrive-benchmarks-auto-oc
Thanks for the link. What I meant is when I loaded up the bios it had cpu frequency at 3800 when I used the eztune it changed settings and then said 4000..
Just set your ram to rated speeds and timing and let the Cpu handle its own clocks. The cpu will factor in the workload and cooling to pick the ideal clock within a power limit. The only reason to over lock the Cpu is if you want to increase voltage.
Sometime around 15 years ago, people realized that it was rather dumb for a CPU to sit there burning 50 W at its max clock speed when the computer was idle at the desktop. So they had it try to detect when it was idle, and then reduce the clock speed and voltage to save power.
Then CPUs got more cores, and some people said it was better to get a higher clocked Core 2 Duo than a lower clocked Core 2 Quad, because those extra cores wouldn't help you, but the higher clock speed would. Intel was unhappy with people preferring a lower end CPU, so they introduced turbo and power gating, so that a CPU could turn off some cores and clock the rest higher. That way, if you buy more cores and fewer cores clocked higher would have been better, it will temporarily turn itself into fewer cores clocked higher. There was no longer any reason why a CPU with fewer cores was better then whatever mainstream consumer CPU was the highest end from the same vendor.
But how idle is idle, and when is it safe to turn off cores or clock them higher? And how many cores, and how much higher? Intel's first implementation of turbo was pretty bad, and AMD's first wasn't much better.
But since then, they've both put a ton of work into figuring out the best way to clock various cores higher or lower or turn them off entirely. If you can save enough heat and power by clocking cores lower or turning them off when it doesn't matter that you can use the savings to clock them 5% higher when it does matter, that's as good as making a CPU that is 5% faster across the board. So all CPU vendors know that getting turbo right is a huge deal, and it is a major focus in CPU design.
Today, turbo algorithms are very sophisticated, and can adjust clock speeds separately for different cores, and update them every millisecond or so. The algorithms can look not just at the load on a core, or even on other cores, but also temperatures in various places on the chip and how high various cores were clocked in the recent past. A modern CPU is likely to do more computational work just to figure out how high it should clock various cores than a CPU from twenty years ago would do for all the work it did in total.
But if you set the CPU to a fixed clock speed, you're turning all of that off. And if you're not setting it to a fixed clock speed, then what does "overclocking" even mean? There are a lot of things that it could mean, most of which are stupid, counterproductive, or both.
There are two situations where you could still want to overclock other than for the sake of overclocking, but neither are common for consumer use. In order for it to make sense, the gains you get from setting a fixed clock speed have to exceed what the CPU could have gotten from the stock turbo.
First, suppose that you know that you have a single, fixed workload that is the only thing the CPU will ever do. All cores will be stressed equally, and there is no idle at desktop. For that matter, there may be no desktop. In that case, Intel and AMD have to set the stock speeds conservatively, as there is a lot of variation between chips at an atomic level. If they set the speed such that 95% of their chips will be fine and the other 5% blue screen a lot, that's a disaster. But you might have gotten a lucky chip that can clock 100-200 MHz higher in your particular workload than some others. So it could be safe for you to clock your chip higher at a clock speed that works for your particular workload, even if that fixed clock speed is rather dumb or even unstable for most other workloads.
The other reason is that you could have both the ability and inclination to burn a lot more power than most other people can. That doesn't just mean a big air cooler from Noctua. The turbo algorithm can detect temperature and clock higher if you've got a good cooler. But if you've got a very nice power supply, a motherboard that went way overboard on power delivery, and a sub-ambient, phase-change cooler that can keep your CPU at 20 C even while the CPU is cranking out 300 W, then maybe you could set all the cores to 4.6 GHz and let it burn 300 W and have a legitimate overclock. Of course, it would probably be both cheaper and more effective to spend that money on a higher end CPU like the Ryzen 9 3950X.
It can give you anywhere between 8-20% FPS improvement if you've got the correct bang-for buck Micron E-die , middle of the road Hynic C-die or premium Samsung B-die.
The secret are the tertiary timings, yes you heard me right, not the raw speed (3600/3733Mhz max anyway), not the primary timings or the secondary, it's the tertiary that are the hidden gem which gives a good performance boost.
And for that you need the dram calculator to skip weeks/months of manually finding the one of the few perfect combinations of numbers for your timings.