If you're excited about the new AMD Zen 5 CPUs or thinking of getting one, you're in the right place. In this video, I'll show you some cool tweaks and tips to supercharge your CPU's performance and get the best bang for your buck. Let's dive in and unlock its full potential!
With the latest Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs, particularly the lower-end 6 and 8 core chips, we now have a lower TDP of 65W which means they can be much more power-efficient and easier to cool. Our tests showed that out of the box, these CPUs run reasonably fast but you can get anywhere from 2% to about 13% increased performance just by using some existing AMD tools.
Let’s start with the basics – you’ll need a motherboard that supports overclocking, such as any of the AM5 boards from the X or B series. In our example, we’re using the Asrock X670e Taichi motherboard. All the overclocking settings are done using the Ryzen Master software, so you don't even need to access the BIOS.
First, and likely the easiest setting to adjust, is enabling RAM overclocking. If you've purchased RAM specifically designed for AMD systems, it will likely have an AMD EXPO preset. Open the Ryzen Master software and, in the basic view, select EXPO on the bottom right. Then click apply and test. This will restart your system and apply the settings. After the restart, Ryzen Master will reopen and run a quick test to check stability.
Enabling RAM overclocking often provides you with a performance boost at no extra cost, or more accurately, the performance you originally paid for. In our tests, the 9600X chip consistently performed better with EXPO enabled, while the 9700X had mixed results.
Do bear in mind that if you go past 6000 MHz your system’s stability may be affected, it really depends on the CPU and Memory combo. While the new CPUs are rated to handle up to 8000 MHz, be cautious of the "up to" wording.
Next up we have my favourite setting: AMD PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive). This feature essentially removes many limits on the CPU, enhancing both single and multi-threaded performance. I also like to increase the CPU boost clock by 200 MHz, and so far, I've encountered no issues with this adjustment.
Fair warning though, your CPU will start eating power like crazy and will get hot under full load, but this isn't necessarily a problem. To achieve maximum performance, you'll need a cooler that can handle the additional power. The better your cooler, the more performance you can extract. Alternatively, you can use Auto OC in Ryzen Master, which enables PBO and increases all limits and the boost clock.
We found that it brings power limits from high 80s to over 160 watts, but depending on your cooler you may not be able to sustain this. For us it went from about 63 degrees Celsius to TJMAX of 95C, but we see about 900 MHz frequency bump under full load too. This resulted in an 11% increase in Cinebench R23 scores and about a 10% improvement in 7-Zip multicore compression performance.
The one problem with PBO is that it’s designed for the masses, and since each chip has slightly different characteristics, the CPU generally receives slightly more voltage than needed for stability. This results in higher power consumption and temperatures. This is where the Curve Optimizer comes in. It allows you to tailor your motherboard to the unique characteristics of your specific chip, maximizing performance while keeping it under control.
This is a slightly more involved process, and you will need to select offsets and then run optimiser which takes about an hour each time. Then test your particular programs or games to see if it is stable. AMD recommends setting the offset between -10 and -15. In my tests, I used -30 and saw a significant performance boost but encountered stability issues in multithreaded workloads. Reducing it to -20 stabilized the system in all tests and provided even better performance.
For example, in VRAY, switching from Auto OC to Curve Optimizer with a -20 offset resulted in nearly a 4% gain. In Cinebench R24, we saw about a 3% improvement, and this was one of the tests that didn’t complete with a -30 offset.
To illustrate the results, let’s see what happens on the CPU itself. Just like before the CPU is still at TjMAX of 95°C and uses the same amount of power as Auto OC. However if we look at the CPU frequency, we have gained about 250 MHz and that was all done with just using the tools already provided by AMD. I feel this is especially useful for these lower TDP chips as they are easier to cool. For transparency, we used be quiet! Dark Elite cooler, which is a high-end option but not the absolute top-tier in cooling.
But things don’t end here. For the tinkerers out there, AMD has introduced a new tool called Curve Shaper, which offers even more control over the curve. This requires accessing the BIOS for tweaking and will depend heavily on your specific system workload and requirements. I intentionally kept this video more user friendly, but if there's enough interest, we can do a deep dive into this tool and provide examples on how to use it. Let us know in the comments if that is something you would be interested in.
Which brings us to the conclusion – we yet again have chips that have some extra headroom to play with and I would generally recommend everyone to enable RAM overclocking and run EXPO profile if your sticks support it and then turn on Auto OC with Curve Optimiser offset. Test it out and see if you like it. You can always reset the settings in Ryzen Master and there are plenty of other settings to experiment with if you're into that.