Tuning tips for Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D

Something else is possible: tuning for Ryzen 7000X3D

Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) is old hat with AMD Ryzen, even Zen 2 aka Ryzen 3000 was able to do that. However, AMD has blocked this extended OC function on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.The reasons are obvious: Thanks to the 3D V-Cache, the voltage and thus the clock frequency are limited in order to protect the hardware from damage.Of course, resourceful users could make this function work again with an experimental BIOS, but an official solution from AMD would of course be better.Apparently, the manufacturer got clear feedback from the fans, because Zen 4 with 3D V-Cache is able to use PBO again.

However, AMD points out that manual overclocking is still not possible.This means free multipliers and MHz-OC through the base clock.What exactly does PBO mean in practice?First and foremost, this increases the limits, so the CPU is no longer tied to its energy budget.Furthermore, the duration of the boost can be extended and the cores can be slightly overclocked (up to a maximum of +200 MHz).The 3D cores run at an average of 5.1 GHz ex works, with PBO we were able to increase the clock to ~5.2 GHz on average, both in the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and in the 7900X3D.The same expectations can also be applied to the RAM OC: “Thanks” to the 3D cache, faster memory is less important, but the remaining cores without an extended cache still benefit from it.We ran benchmarks with an active PBO including RAM OC on DDR5-6000 and also kept an eye on the power consumption.The Curve Optimizer is also active here, with a value of -10 on all cores.For comparison purposes, we include the predecessor Ryzen 7 5800X3D with DDR4-3600 and Kombo Strike 1 as well as Intel’s Core i9-13900KS with DDR5-6000 and Core-OC at 100 MHz each.

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