Monday, September 2nd 2019
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.
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
mobo default power settings has a lot to do here; no producer will set the default voltage properly especially for cpu's which auto-oc; in order to prevent instability they allow more power ,within the specs&limit without discrimination; if user has no skill to adjust correctly i don't see where is amd's fault
majority of users had no clue what to do , how to tweak etc... and for mobo producers is more important to be on the safe side which is also normal..
Are you seriously calling this user error?
Whatever dude...
You clearly haven't bothered reading up on the issue at all then.
On all cores?
I decide to wait. For now I never made mistake for platform except when I bought Phenom AM3 instead i7-920 1136.
I believe decision to wait is good because I feel something will become obsolete soon, not just waiting newer hardware because performance.
Why is it so difficult for the second largest x86 maker to provide support for 10 motherboard manufacturers? It's a common cause.
Mobo makers don't have a choice - they have to launch a product even if it means reverse engineering a CPU.
I don't think I've ever heard of another high-profile company doing business like that. In most industries (surely automotive, financial) competitors go along with each other better than AMD does with its essential partners. Bonkers.
also .... remember when peoples used to disable Intel Turboboost? and now that's AMD that has a useless "max speed boost can reach under optimal situation" but "doesn't reach it because of no one give a damn about optimal situation" it's a freaking scandale? oh well ...
AMD could correct the issue indeed ... by putting a little "*" behind the turbo and write
"Max Turbo Frequency
Max turbo frequency is the maximum single core frequency at which the processor is capable of operating using Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and, if present, Intel® Thermal Velocity Boost. Frequency is measured in gigahertz (GHz), or billion cycles per second."
like Intel does ... using their own term and techs in place of Intel's nomenclature, because their advertised speed is indeed the max they can reach ... but they can reach is in some case, thus is it wrongly advertised? if they can reach it only under specific situations? ... well, no ...
well at last i know i do not care about Boost ... (otherwise i would be sueing Intel for my 6600K but boost is useless versus manual OC ... and well AMD will bring that i have lost on my current CPU to me soon (tm))
Were you drinking? That post doesnt even make sense... o_O.
average user don't really start to change settings in bios as either don't care, don't know.. or afraid to f.u. something... is this an "error" ?
People buying expensive multi-core CPUs capable of running 16+ threads aren't interested in sub-1% single-threaded performance differences when 15/16ths of their CPU is idle.
Currently, my PC is running Windows 10 1903 and around 6 desktop apps with low CPU usage, four of which are idle in the background and my Task Manager states that 222 processes are running across 3000+ threads and my CPU load is at 3% spread across eight logical cores.
The concept of having just a single core active on a modern PC is hopelessly false. The only way it's possible is with a synthetic test that runs at highest priority and hogs all logical cores for itself, and then intentionally stalls all cores except one.
In the real world, those 3000+ threads are for the OS and applications I'm running. I want them to run smoothly and silently in the background and if that means my CPU only peaks at 4350MHz instead of the synthetic 4400MHz in a completely arbitrary and unrealistic test, then so be it. I've been witnessing similar behaviour from my Intel CPUs going back to the 2500K I bought. Yes, those hit the exact speeds but only because the steps between frequencies were so huge. They also rarely stayed at their max boost for significant periods, because even in the simpler days of Windows 7 the sheer number of threads the OS was running prevented any cores from going idle long enough to allow single-core boosting to happen.
AMD probably should have deducted 50MHz from their advertised speeds. It's too late now and haters gonna hate but it's hardly a secret that peak boost is an unrealistic scenario, that's how the CPU scene has played things for a decade now.
In time, TSMC's 7nm yields may improve, and a greater percentage of processors will briefly and meaninglessly exceed the arbitrarily-chosen, peak, synthetic, single-core clockspeed. In the meantime, just use your CPU and be happy with it, regardless of what colour box it came in. Windows will never leave your 'idle' cores alone so you're never going to come within 100MHz of the advertised single-threaded peak clock regardless.
Remember, nVidia cards boost significantly past their advertised boost clocks. I can't remember a time when AMD products ever boosted past the advertised boost clocks.
This is exactly the conclusion you CANNOT draw from this. This sample is biased and the testing is uncontrolled - extending the conclusion to the whole population of Zen 2 CPUs is stupid (if you don't understand what's wrong) or dishonest (if you don't care).
An FE 1080 for example was advertised to have a boost clock of 1733mhz but you can look at various reviews that under load it would drop well below that. There was no "maximum" just this one "boost clock". What it means, well be my guest, it's certainly not a maximum nor a minimum though. That's for sure.
In addition to that one can say AMD doesn't have full control over cooling, power delivery and whatnot but Nvidia did, they knowingly shipped cards with the sort of cooling that wouldn't support those boost clocks all the time. And don't get me wrong, AMD does the same for their GPUs. The point is no one is truthful with their boost clocks, there is always caveat, so either everyone is right or no one is.
No one cared though, because it's all about expectations not how truthful you are.
The boosts listed for the cards are a minimum boost. Typically boosting 100-200 MHz higher in normal gaming operations (so long as limits aren't hit and temperatures are kept under their throttling point of 84C (or w/e it is).
www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/15
www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080/29.html
....and the list goes on.
If anyone has a link to a review where these drop below the minimum boost and isn't running furmark and not pegged at 84C/temp limit.......please post it up.
They dug themselves into this mess. 1 week before launch they released this vid. Now imagine how many people pre-ordered their cpu's based on these what if's?
Boost is opportunistic, regardless of whether we're talking about CPUs or GPUs, and regardless of whether it's a red, green, or blue logo on the product.No, that's specifically about PBO overclocking using top-tier motherboards and comes clearly emphasised with the words "might" and "maybe". The dude even slows down and stresses those words, making it clear to anyone with functioning braincells that is it NOT A GUARANTEE you will get those speeds.
How can people not understand the Silicon Lottery and concept of Overclocking by now?
De8auer's takes the time and effort at the start of the video to very clearly explain that he threw out all of the PBO and PBO+ results and only looked at bone-stock submissions. Don't go bringing PBO+ overclocking into this discussion, it's a strawman argument that isn't remotely helping.
Jebaited.
So, how many users have been able to overclock (it isn't overclocking unless you are going past the box specs, be it by clockspeed or core count for clockspeed) past the PBO value (which many/most can't reach)? I've literally only seen a few.
EDIT: "Suddenly, its 4.75 GHz......" that cracked me up.
The lengths to which people would go to in order to come up with shit just to argue against a brand are staggering.
If it's the max and sometimes the average is under that 1733 figure then that means it wouldn't reach it's advertised clock speed all the time. Isn't that as straight forward as it can possibly get ?
No one has "proved" that some AMD CPU's can never reach their max clock speed under any circumstance as far as I know.
The AMD CPUs not reaching the listed boost clock (which is not overclocking - the FACTORY lists that clock) is a SYSTEMIC issue, not a one off like one site showed the GTX 1080 to run in two games.