 AMD made a big splash when we got our hands on 3rd gen Ryzen and confirmed what they already told us. That Team Blue needs to go back to the drawing board. And while they're there, maybe they can unlock all their CPUs like AMD has on Ryzen? And while that may still be early days for Zen 2, let's take a look at how we can make the most of Team Red's generosity. INTRO Since the first generation, back in 2017, Ryzen hasn't been known for being able to clock up much further than what you get out of the box. None of our top-end chips would go much higher than a couple hundred megahertz at best, and many of you reported the same. Of course, while this sounds like a raw deal for overclockers who happen to be AMD fans, it's not all bad news. Because Precision Boost and XFR helped to automatically gain a bit more performance without any tweaking required, so long as you had a good enough cooler. And if you're so inclined, you can set up AMD's automatic overclocking called Precision Boost Overdrive and call it a day. You'll get a mild performance boost up to about 200 megahertz if you're really lucky and dial in the power limits just right, but in my experience, chances are it won't get you very far. And the slightly more involved method of just entering the BIOS, bumping up the voltage, and choosing a specific multiplier like on Intel likely won't get you a very stable system. So you'd be forgiven for using Precision Boost Overdrive and just calling it a day. But that's not why you're here, is it? Let's dive in. There are some things that make the third-gen Ryzen overclocking experience a little more interesting than previous generations. The most obvious being the Ryzen 9 3900X and its multiple dies, called CCDs. Like Threadripper, they communicate with each other over the super-fast Infinity Fabric. But unlike Threadripper, the dies are physically much closer together for much lower latency and appear as a single physical CPU to the operating system. For overclocking purposes, they are separated from each other. In other words, thanks to the silicon lottery, chances are you'll end up with one die capable of overclocking much further than another. Which means an all-core overclock becomes a tricky proposition, one you don't necessarily want if you're after the most performance you can muster. Enter per-CCX overclocking, a concept that may feel a little familiar to X299 platform overclockers. Using the newest version of Ryzen Master, you can visually see which compute complexes, each representing clusters of three to four cores, are the fastest and second fastest on a per-CCD basis. With this information, you can target your overclock to be more aggressive on a given CCX, and this is true even of the single CCD Ryzen 5 and 7 processors. Before we get into the nitty-gritty on overclocking the chip itself, we need to talk about memory, because it's quite important. We've already released a video explaining where the sweet spot is for 3rd gen Ryzen, but to summarize, the Infinity Fabric's own separate clock is tied to the memory speed up until around 1800 MHz or DDR4-3600, after which it automatically decouples to allow for faster memory to run. If you've got a golden chip, you can try your luck by bumping up the speed of the Infinity Fabric to match higher speed memory like DDR4-3800 for best possible results. Overclocking the Infinity Fabric with slower memory may also yield good results depending on the scenario, but as a rule, it's best to keep it one-to-one if possible. Remember that the actual clock speed of DDR memory is half of its published rating because it operates twice per cycle. Memory overclocking, in general, is fairly universal, but there exists a DRAM calculator for Ryzen by Oneusmus that can give you a jumping off point. Plug in your platform details, memory type and speed, and it'll give you some timings based on what it estimates you can get away with. In my experience, it doesn't work with memory faster than 3600, but I've had success using it to help dial in my timings. There's a veritable ocean of jargon and acronyms in here, but beyond what the calculator gives you, here are some general tips. For high speed memory, enable gear down mode for better stability and disable power down mode. As a general rule, I'd suggest adjusting your timings in turn, rebooting each time. Yeah, that's a little tedious, but if one of the timings prevents you from booting, skip it, move on, and then come back and try a higher value until you're stable. This is all worth the trouble, because this really does matter for gaming on Ryzen. Finally, some have observed that a high memory frequency and infinity fabric frequency can impact your CPU overclocking range, so it might be worth saving a second profile with your memory clocked down, but with tighter timings, just in case. The next important pre-game items are voltages, which factor heavily into heat output. As we alluded to in our review, and as Steve over at Gamers Nexus discovered with his cold performance test, keeping temperatures low is imperative for getting better performance out of Ryzen. Since most of you won't be chilling your Ryzen CPUs below ambient, you'll want to know what voltages you can safely lower. Before we begin tweaking, I'd recommend starting out by manually changing every voltage you can to its stock value, not automatic. Here are the relevant voltages we'll be tweaking today. Depending on your goals, you might be able to lower most of these and be okay, or you might need to keep them at least at stock to keep your OC going. It might sound weird because you might think you need more voltage for better performance, but for Ryzen, stability at higher frequencies relies heavily on thermal performance, so the lower you can go, the better. If you do have to turn them up, I'd recommend staying within 5-10% above the stock value to be on the safe side. Many of these voltages are pretty straightforward. You've got the memory voltage, which is typically managed by memory profiles, and you'll only really want to modify these if you're overclocking your RAM. You've got the SoC voltage that manages the uncore, consisting of the cache and the IODi, which can be helpful in overclocking the Infinity Fabric and gaining that last bit of RAM or CPU overclocking stability. And of course, there's the CPU or core voltage, which you'd ideally want to top out at 1.35 volts, unless you have a cooler capable of more than 150 watts of heat dissipation, like a Noctua U12S or a 240-280mm AIO. Yes, I know, the stock is higher, and on that note, if you're seeing strangely high voltages in monitoring apps like HWinfo, it's not your imagination. If a core is parked, which means it is essentially asleep, most tools right now will only report the last known voltage and frequency before that happened, which after a benchmark may be very high. Ryzen Master will show you the true state of each core. It's worth noting at this point that undervolting alone can also slightly improve performance due to how precision boost works, as long as you don't go too low. Now, some voltages are a little less straightforward, and while many of these are typically derived from other voltages, tweaking them can result in better stability, especially if you've modified the voltages they depend on. For example, if you've adjusted the SoC voltage, then the Infinity Fabric data voltage can be adjusted lower to compensate. If you're having trouble with memory stability, you can adjust the VPP voltage, which controls the highest voltage used for memory access for higher reliability, or the VTT voltage, which controls the memory's lowest voltage for signal integrity. Most other voltages won't be very relevant to most users, and can be tweaked down, but won't significantly alter the thermals in spite of some of the higher voltages you might see listed. Next, let's go over some of the other options available to us for overclocking. As usual, you'll want to increase the electrical current capability on your motherboard to get the most out of your OC. If your motherboard has decent VRMs, you'll want to do the same for phase control, and you'll want to set the load line calibration somewhere in the middle to start off with. I'd recommend adjusting these to less aggressive values if possible after you've dialed in your OC to regain some thermal headroom. One final setting related to phases is the switching frequency. Higher is typically better, but will tax your VRMs even further. So if your OC is just a little unstable, you can try adjusting these upward to see if it makes a difference for you. Finally, sense and my skew, if present, should be enabled for overclocking. Now, I've spent all this time explaining everything but overclocking the CPU itself, but now we're ready to get our hands dirty. While there's not a lot of fine control afforded by letting precision boost overdrive...drive, for better results, we'll still want to use Ryzen Master. Because at this time, per-CCX overclocking doesn't appear to be an option in the BIOS, or at least not on our ASUS or MSI motherboards. Now, just because Ryzen Master shows us the fastest and second fastest cores on each CCX, doesn't mean we want to overclock on a core-by-core basis. Because it's actually still the CCX that takes the highest given clock and assigns it to each core. Slower cores will be clocked back down to a preset level if you enter a specific value short of your pure CCX overclock. Meaning the user gets no fine control for core, even if it seems like they do in the software. Speaking of which, your motherboard and even your BIOS revision can and will impact your thermals and how far you can overclock. So it's worth doing a little bit of research before you begin and waiting if your BIOS is known to be problematic. As far as choosing a frequency to start off with though, a good jumping off point would be a middle ground between your CPU's rated boost and its stock clock. If it's stable, great. Now you can start cranking each CCX in turn to see where they stop. For stability's sake, I'd recommend 50 to 100 MHz below your highest stable clock, but that's a matter of taste. In our case, here's what we managed on our 3rd gen Ryzen 9, 7, and 5 processors. Performance improvements over stock can go as far as 10% or more depending on the overclock and the workload. Although in very light tasks, you might actually lose some performance because your stock per core boost might for a short while be able to go higher than what you can achieve on all cores. But if how responsive your web browser is were your primary concern, you wouldn't really be overclocking, would you? Either way, you need to be able to keep your CPU cool enough for any of this to matter in the first place. Not to worry though, you can curb some of that by turning down your voltage and VRM phase settings until you hit a point where you're no longer stable. And then choose a step or two above that point. It'll take some trial and error, but with enough determination, you can have your performance per watt cake and eat it too. Thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy some of the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one. I think we have this back in stock and the hoodie and our community forum, which you should totally join. Maybe discuss some of your overclocking secrets.