Clock Frequencies

The following chart shows how well the processor sustains its clock frequency and which boost clock speeds are achieved at various thread counts. This test uses a custom-coded application that mimics real-life performance—it is not a stress test like Prime95. Modern processors change their clocking behavior depending on the type of load, which is why we provide three plots with classic floating point math, SSE SIMD code, and modern AVX vector instructions. Each of the three test runs calculates the same result using the same algorithm, just with a different CPU instruction set.



The chart starts out with the cores reaching 5.05 GHz, which is 50 MHz higher than maximum official boost rating by AMD—good. 5.05 GHz is sustained even with four threads active, which fully loads the Zen 4 cores. Once we go to 5 threads in higher, clock speeds seem to drop, but that's because at this point we're starting to put load on the Zen 4c cores, which run at lower frequencies. The frequency plotted is the average of all the Zen 4 Cores active, plus more and more Zen 4c Cores, which all run at a lower frequency than the Zen 4 Cores, which drags down the average.

That's why I tested just the Zen 4c core frequency scaling separately in the chart below.



Nice! You're always getting 3.7 GHz.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Ryzen 5 8500G is a bit more limited than other AMD Ryzen processors. The multiplier is locked—there is no way to set a fixed CPU core frequency. Not in the BIOS, not in Ryzen Master. I suspect this has to do with the fact that there are two core types now, which are clocked independently. What you can still do is use PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) to adjust the boosting behavior of the CPU.

In this review you'll find a second data point "PBO Max," which is the Ryzen 5 8500G running with the limits removed, a PBO Scalar of 10X, and a clock override of +200 MHz—the maximum settings available. Curve Optimizer was left at default settings, which means there's just a bit more headroom available.