Overclocking

Overclocking the Ryzen 5 3600 was mostly held back by temperatures. When using our typical OC voltage of 1.4 V, the CPU temperature would skyrocket above 100°C within seconds of applying a heavy load. After backing down a bit on the voltage, to 1.37 V, we reached 4.125 GHz all-core perfectly stable. Now, that frequency is of course lower than the chip's maximum boost frequency of 4.2 GHz. As our performance numbers show, the manual overclock can only shine in specific applications that fully load all cores, and even there, the differences are small.

Using a 240 mm AIO watercooler yielded another 25 MHz because we could bump up the voltage a little bit—not worth it.