Tweaking - results - conclusion
An example of system overclocking and results
As we found out earlier, the results of system tuning with CTR are influenced by the motherboard, "luck" of the sample processor, and the cooling system used. Fortunately, CTR will not leave the owners of budget systems behind and will provide additional performance with the same power consumption.
In fact, let's begin the smart overclocking on ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero and the new Ryzen 9 3900XT. The first step in the UEFI (BIOS) was to set up VRM:
Then we made sure that the Voltage CPU and Multiplier CPU were in the "Auto" mode.
I also advise you not to use serious overclocking DRAM, because CTR cannot distinguish the problem of voltage shortages on cores from unstable DRAM. For example, I use a 3200 MHz DRAM frequency. The next step is to run CTR.exe and evaluate how well the monitoring works. The windows with frequency should not have "0" and the core tags should not have "100".
If the CTR does not see the frequency, Ryzen Master should be reinstalled, and if the kernel tags look incorrect, clear the System log and reboot the system.
Now we need to do a diagnostic of our processor. This will save the tuning time in the future and will also give us an idea of what kind of sample we have and what it is capable of. We press the "DIAGNOSTIC" button. After a few "steps" CTR will log a small report and set automatically recommended values for safe overclocking (orange and red ovals).
Be patient, the diagnosis may take some time (the number of steps is not a fixed value). Then we press the "START" button. CTR will start the Cinebench R20 automatically, get the results from it, and close it. Then we will start the step-by-step selection of the stable frequency for each CCX. After a while, CTR will detect instability on one (or more) CCX and inform the user about it. There is no need to worry, CTR knows what to do.
Usually, the tuning process takes about 15 minutes. When CTR is finished, the user interface will be unlocked and the resulting tuning results will appear in the log.
Also, if "CB20 testing" was not disabled in the settings, the user will receive an additional report, which will be located on the "BENCHMARK" page.
+10% with the same TDP. Looks good, doesn't it? At this point, the user will have a dilemma to activate the profile (CREATE & APPLY PROFILE) and leave CTR or continue experiments.
I preferred to continue, I want to get even more performance from the processor. Of course, now I need to adjust some values so that CTR allows you to make additional overclocking. First of all, I'm correcting the Reference voltage value to 1325 mV, which is slightly higher than the maximum safe value for AVX Light mode. Next, I recalculate the Reference Frequency value relative to the values I received after the diagnosis (Reference voltage 1250 and Reference Frequency 4375). This is easy. There is a tacit rule for Zen 2 processors, every +25mV to Reference voltage is +50MHz to Reference Frequency. That is we have 3 extra steps of 25 mV = 150 MHz. If you accidentally make a mistake it will not cause any problems in most cases. I made a mistake on purpose and instead of 4525 MHz, I entered 4550 MHz.
This mistake did not affect the CTR's performance and resulted in an unprecedented 4650 4650 4550 4525 MHz overclocking result. On the "BENCHMARK" page you could see the value of 8133, but the power consumption increased to 169W.
Concluding
To sum up, if you use a Reference voltage higher than CTR offers, it means that you will automatically get a disproportionate increase in power consumption, while the system performance will increase slightly. I corrected the voltage by only 75mV, but I got only 2% extra performance and 20% extra power consumption. This is expected because any crystal and microarchitecture have their limits, and scaling the frequency relative to voltage is not an infinite phenomenon. That's all for now. Very soon AMD will introduce the Zen 3 generation, which means that the CTR project will receive another update.
- 1usmus (Yuri Bubliy)
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