Before you learn how to overclock your CPU, there's a few basic principles to get your head around. The first one is heat. Inevitably, the more voltage you add to your components, the more heat that component is going to produce. Second, the higher the clock speed you're trying to achieve, the more voltage you will need to power that attempt.
Makes enough sense. And thirdly, there's only so much voltage your PC part can take before you start to see detrimental effects. These could be a drop in frame rates for GPUs, corrupting processes on the CPU, or even a failure to boot at all. These, essentially, are the basic limits of overclocking.
How to overclock your AMD processor. With a high voltage tolerance and improved thermal design, Godavari pushes clockspeeds several hundred MHz higher than Kaveri and responds well to third-party air and water cooling. The name may sound like heaven, but this chip goes like the devil. Motherboards play an outsized role in AMD overclocking results. How to use Ryzen Master, AMD's powerful new CPU overclocking tool Ryzen Master is a powerful, yet easy to use tool for overclocking AMD's new processors.
All chips are born equal, but some are more equal than others. You'll often hear overclockers talk of 'The Silicon Lottery.' In short, this is to do with the manufacturing process with each and every processor. Small imperfections in the application of the silicon lead to a variance in how well the chips perform, both in stability with an increase in voltage, and how much heat they produce at max load. You might get lucky with yours, or you might not. It can equate from anywhere between 0.2GHz frequency difference to, in some cases, up to 1GHz in overclocking potential. So, as long as you have one of the, and the capable of overclocking, you can dive into your BIOS and get to overclocking – and we’re here to help.
Keep your overclocked rig cool with our guide on. Prime95 is a key overclocking tool, with its stress tests being a major part of the process 1.
Check CPU stability To ensure a successful overclock, we'll need to know that the CPU is stable at both idle and max load. To do this, we'll be using a free piece of software called. You’ll also need a program that monitors the temperatures your CPU is outputting. We used here, but if you’re using a Ryzen processor, you’ll likely want to either install AMD’s software. The latter is especially useful, as it will feature all your system monitoring in one place.
There are alternatives out there – Corsair and NZXT have proprietary software that works with their products, plus most motherboards have viewable temperature controls that you can use from the desktop. Check your core temp Once those programs are extracted or installed, load your temp monitoring software to begin monitoring your processor’s temperature. Always take into consideration all your core temps to get an idea of how hot your processor is running. Run the stress tests Now, we'll want to benchmark your CPU, at stock, to see how hot it runs at 100%.
Start Prime95, select 'Just stress testing,' and then you'll be given a list of options as to which stress tests you'd like to perform. Choose 'Blend Test,' and press 'OK'. Get into the BIOS After about 5 to 10 minutes, once your temperatures have stabilized, go into Prime95.
Select 'Test' on the top bar and hit 'Stop', then restart your PC and tap that Delete key on your keyboard to get into your BIOS. (Be sure to pay attention to your early login screen, as the key press to enter your BIOS tends to differ between device vendors.) In this test, we're using an ASRock Z97 Extreme 4 motherboard. So, the UEFI could be a little different in comparison to some of the other manufacturers you'll find out there, but the base settings will essentially be the same. Default profiles limit potential, but are often safer than manually entering them 5. Go for auto-overclock Once inside your BIOS, find the overclocking tab.
In ours, it's named 'OC Tweaker.' Once in, you have several options. The easiest way to overclock your CPU is to let the motherboard do the majority of the work.
Most manufacturers will include overclock profiles, usually ranging from 4GHz to 4.8GHz, depending on the CPU installed. Setting the motherboard to run one of these profiles will allow it to attempt to overclock the chip to that frequency without any user input. This can be a quick solution, especially if you're only dialing in a conservative overclock (3.5GHz to 4GHz, for example), but this isn't conducive if you want to push beyond that 4.8GHz barrier, or if you can't reach that frequency through the automated profiles.
Also, if you’re using an AMD Ryzen or Threadripper processor, you can go into Ryzen Master to get access to easy, no-brainer overclocking – in the same place as your CPU temp readings. This looks like it'll be stable. Changing the multiplier More adept users will find manual control a lot more comprehensive in regards to what true overclocking is all about. To keep it simple, you want to change the CPU ratio, or multiplier, for all cores to the target number you wish to achieve. That's 35 in this case.
The multiplier then works with the cores' BCLK (or 'base clock') frequency (usually 100) to create that final figure of 3.5GHz. In this tutorial, we're going to attempt to overclock our CPU, just to start with, from 3.5 to 4GHz, simply by changing the multiplier. Always stress test your CPU before overclocking, to get a good reference point. Test at max load Once you've changed the CPU ratio multiplier to 40, save changes and exit the BIOS.
Boot into Windows, open Core Temp to monitor your CPU temp, then open Prime95 and select 'Options', 'Torture Test' and finally 'Blend Test,' to see how your chip fairs at max load. If it's stable for at least five minutes, we can begin to up the multiplier to achieve a higher overclock. Finding the limit At this point in overclocking your CPU, you'll want to increase the multiplier by one and repeat the process of stress testing in Windows each time, until you reach the point where you initially either get a Blue Screen of Death or your CPU begins to thermally throttle itself. Ideally, you want to blue screen before you reach your thermal limit. Increasing the voltage To overcome the blue screen issue, we need to start working with the Vcore voltage.
Back in the BIOS, you want to find CPU Vcore Voltage Mode. Change this to 'Fixed'. At this point, you may need to do some research as to what the stock Vcore your CPU takes, and what people are suggesting for overclocking.
You'll want to begin increasing the voltage by 0.01 volts each time, until you can successfully boot, stress test and maintain stability at your target frequency. Once you get a little more comfortable overclocking, you'll find yourself increasing voltages by 0.05 or 0.1 at a time.
It's more about learning how your CPU responds to different amounts of voltage at this point. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you cannot reach that next frequency, regardless of how much voltage you throw at it. This is when you want to dial back your overclock by 0.1GHz and drop the Vcore voltage back to the last stable settings for that frequency and maintain it there, as this is your final overclock.
Back to benchmarking To ensure a stable overclock, you should now benchmark for as long as you feel is appropriate. This can be anywhere from an hour to a full day, depending on how patient you are. Finally, you can enjoy your machine at its utmost potential. This article is part of TechRadar's. The world inside of our machines is changing more rapidly than ever, so we're looking to explore everything CPUs, GPUs and all other forms of the most precious metal in computing.
Give your graphics a boost by learning.
Overclocking Results So from our test setup, we tested one each of the CPUs at both 'stock' and our 'max overclock' setting, combining the peak CPU, DRAM, and graphics frequency all into one overclock. This means we are comparing the following: Overclocked vs Stock Processors Ryzen 3 2200G 4C / 4T Vega 8 Graphics AMD Ryzen 5 2400G 4C / 8T Vega 11 Graphics CPU Stock 3.50 / 3.70 GHz 3.60 / 3.90 GHz Overclock 3.9 GHz All-Core 4.0 GHz All-Core DRAM Stock DDR4-2400 DDR4-2400 Overclock DDR4-3333 C17 DDR4-3333 C17 Graphics Stock 1100 MHz 1250 MHz Overclock 1360 MHz 1400 MHz Users quick on the ball will see that we've run DDR4-2400 as our 'stock' memory frequency. This is ultimately what would be chosen if a user did not even apply any profile whatsoever, and simply put the memory in the system right out of the box.
Anecdotally, we still see a number of users failing to enable their high-speed memory, because it requires that extra selection of XMP which is not easily detailed by the memory vendors (to be fair, it would be impossible to list every BIOS version and directions on how-to for new users). Having seen a close friend who I thought knew how to do this, we're going to use the opportunity to show the uplift of overclocking the memory from 'out-of-the-box' to a proper overclock as well. Power Consumption For our power consumption metrics, we use a Prime 95 blended torture test on fixed threads and Furmark blender GPU burn-in at 1080p to generate a strong and consistent load. Then pull the power figure from a power consumption monitor at the wall to get the power consumption.
For the idle test, a consistent and base stable figure is taken whereas with load, a peak value is taken instead. The values were taken after 10 minutes, both idle with the OS in a stable and idle state with no foreground applications running, with the figures being taken under load after exactly 10 minutes with Prime95 and Furmark running simultaneously.
As expected, the idle power numbers do not change that much with overclocking, however at load we see the Ryzen 3 2200G gain another 46W and the Ryzen 5 2400G gain another 63W. This essentially almost doubles the power consumption of the Ryzen 5, which as we see below requires good cooling.
Temperatures Considered to be as important as power consumption, temperature can be the difference between a completely stable and quiet system, and one that's riddled with instability. At idle state, the package temperature was recorded with HWMonitor after 10 minutes of idleness, with room temperature being monitored via an electronic room thermometer.
The room temperature was deducted from the package to give the delta temperature. At load, the peak temperature was taken from HWMonitor with the current room temperature being deducted to give the delta temperature.No overclocked values for AMD Wraith Stealth - the system rebooted due to temperature limits At idle, both the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO cooler and the provided stock AMD Wraith Stealth CPU cooler remain within a reasonable distance of each other, but under load when overclocked the Wraith failed to deliver with both Prime95 and Furmark applied; the system would hang and crash. The AMD Wraith Stock cooler is absolutely fine for smaller overclocks, but for big overclocks, then a decent air tower or good AIO CPU cooler is paramount to getting the most from the APUs. Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing.
It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms. In both cases, our peak productivity benchmark shows a performance gain of just over 11% when overclocked. Rendering - Blender 2.78: For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene.
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Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture. Blender is slightly more consevative, with a 7% increase in performance. Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
WinRAR is normally memory dependent here, but something else seems to be the bottleneck. Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post. IGP Gaming - Civilization 6 First up in our Ryzen 2000-series APU stock vs overclocked gaming tests is Civilization 6.
Originally created by legendary Sid Meier who has a strong lineage in my eyes, mainly thanks to many childhood hours spent on Railroad Tycoon. Civilization 6 continues a long line of previous versions of the Civilization franchise, which has been critically acclaimed for allowing the player to take control of various nations to create their own empire, conquer the world and if you're lucky, watch legendary peace symbol Ghandi declare nuclear war! With an overclock on all three major contributing factors to performance on the Ryzen 3 2200G APU, memory, iGPU and CPU frequency, a total increase of around 23% performance in average frame rates was present in Civilization 6 at medium settings at a 1920x1080 resolution. What is most interesting is the 99th percentile frame rates improve by 30%, showing that an average overclock on all three elements can boost performance so well in such a CPU heavy title. Gaming - Total War: WARHAMMER 2 at 720p Not only is the Total War franchise one of the most popular real-time tactical strategy titles of all time, but Sega delve into multiple worlds such as the Roman Empire, Napoleonic era and even Attila the Hun, but more recently they nosedived into the world of Games Workshop via the WARHAMMER series. Developers Creative Assembly have used their latest RTS battle title with the much talked about DirectX 12 API, just like the original version, Total War: WARHAMMER, so that this title can benefit from all the associated features that comes with it. The game itself is very CPU intensive and is capable of pushing any top end system to their limits.
For the 2200G, the most sizable benefit for an overclock was in the lower resolution 99th percentile frame rates - moving from 23 FPS to 35 FPS is a sure-fire way of getting a smoother result. Gaming - Total War: Warhammer 2 at 1080p Because of the small numbers, it is perhaps hard to see that the Ryzen 3 2200G gets a 24% increase in 1080p performance. This is carried through with the Ryzen 5 2400G, which gets a 26-31% increase in frame rates and pencentile numbers at both 720p and 1080p. Discrete Gaming: Shadow of Mordor The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For our discrete gaming titles, it was kind of expected that the average frame rates might not move, but here we see the Ryzen 3 2200G get a nice boost in 99th percentile numbers. Shadow of Mordor, particularly one scene in our test, seems very receptive to quad-core CPUs to the point where any more cores or threads seems to perform worse. We've seen it in other tests, and when overclocked, we see the Ryzen 3 2200G take the lead in the percentile graph.
F1 2017 Released in the same year as the title suggests, F1 2017 is the ninth variant of the franchise to be published and developed by Codemasters. The game is based around the F1 2017 season and has been and licensed by the sports official governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). F1 2017 features all twenty racing circuits, all twenty drivers across ten teams and allows F1 fans to immerse themselves into the world of Formula One with a rather comprehensive world championship season mode. Codemasters' EGO engine has historically been very memory receptive, especially for 99th percentile numbers.
Here we see a good jump for the Ryzen 3 2200G again when the system is overclocked. Monday, April 16, 2018 - I'm going with a 2200G for my son's first PC build. I remember my Pentium II 233 build with the help of Anandtech WAY back in the day, complete with SCSI HDD. It was a sweet system that lasted a long time. Now, back the AMD build, any mobo recommendations? I would like to keep it mini-itx if possible and I am leaning toward the GIGABYTE GA-AB350N: ($109) but am open to suggestions. Reliability is top concern and two digital video outs (HDMI, or DisplayPort, not analog DSUB).
Starting with the integrated GPU but maybe down the road going discrete. Thanks in advance for advice!:-).