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 the 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.



Very nice! The rated 4.6 GHz maximum Boost is achieved even for workloads with many active threads. At lower core counts, we consistently see 4.65 GHz, which is an extra 50 MHz above specification. When heavily loaded with calculations, we still have excellent clock speeds—4.5 GHz is much higher than the 3.8 GHz base clock rating.

Overclocking

For overclocking, I set a fixed voltage of 1.35 V and started increasing clocks, while checking stability at the same time. This is extremely easy thanks to the AMD Ryzen Master software, which has come a long way and is now topnotch.

With 1.35 V, the 4.6 GHz frequency was a tiny bit unstable, so I settled for 1.4 V, which made 4.6 GHz 100% stable, and temperatures were still very decent.