Test setup
The test system for the guide consists of the AMD Ryzen R9 7950X 16-core CPU and the ASRock X670E PG Lightning motherboard. Even though the silicon lottery and the optimization of motherboards always play a big role for RAM overclocking – EXPO and XMP are nothing else – the elementary AGESA microcode from AMD is the same for all motherboards, no matter if the X670(E) motherboards of today or the smaller B650 boards of tomorrow.
The new DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 standards alone require new technologies such as SMT components in the production, so that even “inexpensive” motherboards cannot be cut corners with. The best example of this is the X670E PG Lightning, which is ASRock’s most affordable motherboard and offers flagship features like an 8-layer board, a 14+2+1 phase power supply, 21 USB ports, as well as PCIe 5.0 on the x16 slot for the GPU and via M.2.
Ryzen Master
AMD’s Ryzen Master software also remains for Zen 4. As usual, various monitoring data can be read out here and overclocking with PBO or Curve Optimizer can be set, even if it always requires a reboot afterwards. But the Ryzen Master is not only useful for CPU OC, because the complete RAM timings, voltages and terminations can also be read from here in Advanced mode. It can also be used to monitor the FCLK (Infinity Fabric Clock) from within the OS, which is not (yet) possible with almost any other software.
HWInfo 7.30
The popular monitoring software HWInfo from Martin Malik has been updated to version 7.30 just the day before yesterday and with it many new features for Ryzen 7000 CPUs and X670(E) or B650 motherboards. The FCLK of the Zen 4 can also be monitored with the new software, as well as temperatures and power consumption per core, cache segment, chiplet or for the entire CPU, and much more.
Stability tests and other tips – y-cruncher and Testmem5
The well-known stress test tools, such as Testmem5 or HCI Memtest, are still suitable for testing the stability of DDR5. However, these do not cover all timings with certainty. For example, too tight tRDWR timing can run through TM5 without errors, but under heavy compute loads such as y-cruncher or LinpackXtreme can crash the system immediately. I therefore recommend the following routine for the RAM stress test on Zen 4 at this time:
- 1 run y-cruncher 2.5B
- 1 cycle LinpackXtreme or LinX with problem size 35000 (10 GB)
- only then the actual RAM stress test with Testmem5, HCI Memtest etc.
(Prime95 is currently not very suitable for Zen 4, at least with active AVX-512, since the application simply freezes or the workers never start. There will probably have to be a patch here)
By the way, there are no more WHEA errors when the FCLK is too high, as was the case with Zen 3. Either the system does not boot at all if the FCLK setting is too high, the system shuts down directly or errors appear in RAM stress tests. Accordingly, you should first leave the FCLK at a conservative value like 2000 MHz for the RAM OC and only look for the maximum FCLK at the very end.
Currently, the automatic recovery function is still very poor for non-training RAM timings, so I estimated that I had to resort to the CMOS clear jumper in 95% of NoPost scenarios. Here, the following routine has proven to be the most reliable for me with the current AGESA: Turn off the power supply, ClearCMOS, turn on the power supply, ClearCMOS, boot the system.
The post after a ClearCMOS takes up to 400 seconds depending on the RAM configuration, whereby the last BIOS release could already remedy this a good bit. Thus, you might have to be particularly patient with the RAM OC here (at least with the current AGESA).
As always, you will find a list of the components and abbreviations used in the diagrams on the following pages:
Test systems |
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Hardware: |
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Cooling: |
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Housing: |
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Periphery: |
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Measuring devices: |
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Abbreviations: |
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- 1 - What's new with Ryzen 7000?
- 2 - Test Setup and Software Tools
- 3 - BIOS Settings (1/2) – DDR5
- 4 - BIOS Settings (2/2) – CPU-OC and other
- 5 - Tested Configurations (1/2)
- 6 - Tested Configurations (2/2)
- 7 - Synthetics (1/2) – LinpackXtreme, AIDA64, Geekbench 3
- 8 - Synthetics (2/2) – SuperPi 32M, PyPrime 2.0 2B, Timespy CPU
- 9 - Gaming QHD, FHD – ACC, CSGO, SoTR
- 10 - Summary and Recommendations
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