Monday, September 2nd 2019
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Der8auer: Only Small Percentage of 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs Hit Their Advertised Speeds
World famous overclocker Der8auer published his survey of boost clocks found on 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs. Collecting data from almost 3,000 entries from people around the world, he has found out that a majority of the 3000 series Ryzen CPUs are not hitting their advertised boost speeds. Perhaps one of the worst results from the entire survey are for the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, for which only 5.6% of entries reported have managed to reach the boost speeds AMD advertises. However, the situation is better for lower-end SKUs, with about half of the Ryzen 5 3600 results showing that their CPU is boosting correctly and within advertised numbers.
Der8auer carefully selected the results that went into the survey, where he discarded any numbers that used either specialized cooling like water chillers, Precision Boost Overdrive - PBO or the results which were submitted by "fanboys" who wanted to game the result. Testing was purely scientific using Cinebench R15 and clock speeds were recorded using HWinfo (which got recommendation from AMD), so he could get as precise data as possible.Der8auer comments that he still recommends Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, as they present a good value and have good performance to back. He just finds it very odd that AMD didn't specify what you need to reach the advertised boost speeds.
If you would like to see the more in depth testing, here is the English version of the video:
Der8auer carefully selected the results that went into the survey, where he discarded any numbers that used either specialized cooling like water chillers, Precision Boost Overdrive - PBO or the results which were submitted by "fanboys" who wanted to game the result. Testing was purely scientific using Cinebench R15 and clock speeds were recorded using HWinfo (which got recommendation from AMD), so he could get as precise data as possible.Der8auer comments that he still recommends Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, as they present a good value and have good performance to back. He just finds it very odd that AMD didn't specify what you need to reach the advertised boost speeds.
If you would like to see the more in depth testing, here is the English version of the video:
253 Comments on Der8auer: Only Small Percentage of 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs Hit Their Advertised Speeds
Now, if this really was an issue of cooling/power/board/silicon lottery/nominal conditions/user error/polling rates/AIB UEFI's, etc, they probably would have said so, right? Instead, they identified they have an issue and are correcting it via FW and not telling the client some line about "maximum" clocks and whatever other BS was brought up in this thread.
Here it is.......
EDIT: Did anyone else notice they said "EXPECTED boost clock" and didn't try to split hairs on defining "maximum" or clarifying further what that meant?
I wonder what those who thought otherwise will say now? Do you think we will hear from anyone after this?
With an average clockspeed of 4.2ghz my 3900x is performing in the 80th percentile on userbenchmark. Userbenchmark isn't the greatest benchmark, but sometimes aggregate benchmark data can be useful.
I intend to install a full custom water cooling loop later this year, and I am excited to see how high I can get my average clockspeed. Maybe even with this fix amd has planned, I may even exceed the maximum advertised boost clock like that one amd video said may be possible.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/der8auer-only-small-percentage-of-3rd-gen-ryzen-cpus-hit-their-advertised-speeds.258840/post-4109577
The AIBs have nothing to do with it. Please see the links to the previous posts just above yours.
It isnt a TLDR. Those are links to a single post with a paragraph from AMD stating they are fixing the problem through firmware. They dont mention rogue AIB UEFIs or too much voltage or whatever else you've mentioned.
This is not an AIB problem.
There's enough of a spread in the Der8auer survey results to show a clear bell-curve of results implying that this isn't a firmware limitation but simply the spread of results from the silicon lottery. The peak of the bell curve is typically 25-50MHz lower than AMD's figures and if the survey data is realistic then AMD either miscalculated slightly or rounded up the figures to the nearest 0.1GHz.
It's still comical that this topic has even come up, firstly because Intel's CPUs have arbitrary time-limits to their boost, after which they slow down again far more than Zen2 chips do, and secondly because the number of situations where only one core is active in a modern machine is zero. The only people who care about this "peak single-core boost frequency" aren't people who are actually using the chips to do stuff. The minute you give any multi-core CPU a real-world workload, the OS scheduler is going to use all available cores to run background tasks, meaning that 'single core' is never achieved.
Hell, the monitoring software uses a core to monitor the single-threaded synthetic load, thus using a second core. It's so dumb that the only people left arguing it seriously are just in it for the arguing, not actually giving a damn about the topic at all ;)
It was straight from AMD. If the AIBs were to blame, you're damn right AMD would have said so. They didn't.
If you actually read AMD's email, quoted above, it says they have a firmware bug, no spec in the world would help the board makers work around that, as they can't edit AMD's firmware. Right, because you and only you, have a solution to all the problems so many of us have had...
How simple, amazing...
I wish I would've tried that three months ago...
Oh right, if I drop my CPU Voltage, my system won't boot...
Because we talk about 4 years old CPU with lower frequency it's logic to OC both to the maximum and then to compare them.
That mean i7-6950X 4.4GHz boost on all cores, 3.8-4.0GHz Cache frequency vs R9-3900X on how much is boost...
no one know that for sure, enthusiasts community still examine is it boost as AMD advertised.
Oh and it's also on AMD's official Twitter account now.