Where to start learning about overclocking?

[taylor10]

Every post and guide I've found that details overclocking doesn't really explain what they are doing. The -why- is just as important as the what for me. So when they start diving into clock speeds, TMPs and DMVs and LMNOps (being facetious) I get very lost very quickly. I'm a computer adept, running a custom rig. I know enough to flash my bios, make sure my RAM memory is set to use the right speed, and know my way around a registry with relative ease, but most of these concepts are well over my head.

So, where would you recommend I start learning about the ins and outs of overclocking AMD products to come to an understanding of both -what- increases my performance and -why-? Older threads, youtube videos, whatever it might be. I've done my own research for awhile and I've only managed to confused myself more than when I started. Thanks!

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Edited May 20, 2021 by taylor10

[ir_cow]

Well it's never in one place that's for sure. I'll tell you right now most websites just copy and paste from the last without understanding whats really going on. A few exceptions of course.

Anyways the way I learned was reading white-papers, watching and reading countless topics that could be considered really boring to some.

Like last night was learning about superconductors and how less energy is lost the colder something becomes. This translates to CPU overclocking (or really any overclocking that deals with voltage). On the extreme scale the colder something is, the less voltage it will leak out, thus requiring less voltage to achieve the same results. Thats the short version of this.

Next if I didnt know how it applies already, I would do experiments following this claim. After a few days of playing around I have found that watercooling has a higher overclock vs air cooling. 

Than you have something like memory overclocking which frankly is extremely lacking any information. Ive been reading lots of old textbooks regarding DDR and applying that to what I know elsewhere. So for the Ryzen memory article I wrote, while it is flawed in some ways, I did it all myself by testing hundreds of different settings to see if AMD DDR4 3600 "sweet spot" claim was real and how memory really was tied to the infinity Fabric. Now I wasnt the first to undercover this, but the Ryzen Gen 1 and 2 articles I read never explained the correlation very well. When Gen 3 (3000 series) came out, I just setup a experiment to see what the facts where.

You aren't going to find it in one place. Best to jump on forums and ask questions. People will point you around the web or answer it directly.

[Fight Game]

The cpu's and gpu's we have today, all overclock pretty well on their own without doing a thing.  I'm surprised the ram hasn't started doing it too, tbh.  There just isn't much to gain by manually overclocking them any more.  Sometimes, and depending on the workload, performance actually goes down when you manually overclock.  You could spend days and days trying to get it all dialed in as high as possible, only to then learn that you've gained nothing, actually lost some, or probably at the very most, gained 5%.  Unfortunately it's just not worth the hassle any more imo.  Just enable whatever boost technology intel or amd has in the bios and be done with it, and save yourself a ton of time and headaches!  I hate saying it, trust me.  I really miss the days of gaining 50% performance from putting in some hard work to learn it all and do it.  But it's also nice to simply be able to turn one setting in the bios to "on" and be done with it

Edited May 6, 2021 by Fight Game

[Guest_Jim_*]

The more opportunistic boost technologies do seem to negate at least some benefits of overclocking, but there are still some gains to be made, if you get very deep into the details. Things like the per CCD overclocking on AMD CPUs, for example, can surpass PBO, but my understanding is that takes quite a bit of tweaking to get right.

Personally, I prefer going a different route and that is to undervolt. A negative voltage offset does not always disable the boost algorithms and can then give those algorithms greater power and thermal headroom to work with. LLC can also be tweaked for the same purpose, but I am less familiar with that and it varies with motherboard manufacturer. I have my Ryzen 7 2700X and both of my AMD GPUs set to undervolt and the results are nice. The Threadripper 1950X is manually overclocked at stock voltage, but being first generation does not have as advanced of boost capabilities. (It's not really much of an overclock though, just fixed at its highest all-core boost of 3.8 GHz, so under heavy load it does not fall to the 3.4 GHz base frequency. Any higher and it hard locks when processing video too often, but was otherwise stable at 4.0 GHz.)

[ir_cow]

@Fight Game For the most part yeah, components these days come with a "Turbo" or "Boost" and saves a lot of headaches. Still though you can squeeze a good amount of extra performance from the CPU since those Turbo clocks are for only 1 core at a time. For graphics cards, it has been like 2-3% gain. The biggest improvement is actually getting a card with good cooling as it will auto boost the clocks fairly close to the limit and you don't have to lift a finger.

For memory. Well there is a reason why XMP profiles exist. Technically anything above the rated frequency the CPU official supports is a overclocking the memory controller. So Ryzen 5000 series is DDR3 3200. Above this its a overclock on the memory controller, which is why not all memory is plug n' play and why lot of people fail to even boot with higher speed memory.

[Fight Game]

Yup, I understand there can be gains, but it's situational.  For me, I mostly play a game that uses about 1.25 cores and the single core boost I get from dialing in the pbo gets up to 4850 or 4875mhz which is a good 100mhz higher or more than I've been able to get from an all core oc or from a per-ccd oc.  But even still, it's a tiny 100mhz so it don't matter much either way.  Most times I end up with a few other programs running so it doesn't boost quite that high, but still just as high as I would get oc'ing another way.  I've spent countless hours trying, and I think until I see proof of some very real gains on future cpu's and video cards, it's just not worth the time invested any more.  But again, it depends on your/my workload.  

edit:  do we not have the option to display a signature any more?

MSI B550 MAG Tomahawk motherboard

AMD 5600x cpu @ 4850mhz with Arctic 240 aio

Powercolor 5700XT Red Devil video

Crucial Ballistix 4x8gb ram @ 3933mhz/1967 IF

Samsung 980 Pro 1TB M.2

Corsair 750 power supply

MSI 34" 3440x1440 curved monitor, 50" 1080p tv, 24" 1080p monitor

Edited May 7, 2021 by Fight Game