AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs: CCX Overclocking and Low Idle Power

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    AMD’s 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 CPUs come with an unbelievable price-performance ratio and an impressively low TDP of 65W for the mid-range parts and 105W for the higher-end Ryzen 9 (and the 3800X). However, when it comes to overclocking, most of the chips barely budge higher than their rated frequencies under normal conditions, something many enthusiasts have been pissed off about. The reason: AMD overclocks the Zen 2 CPUs out of the box, and recommends users to fiddle with the Infinity fabric and the memory speeds instead (ratio of 1:1). Now, popular overclocker, der8auer has reported some never-seen-before observations: One of them is with regard to the idle power draw of the Ryzen 3000 processors and the other pertains of course to overclocking.

    Ryzen 3000 CCX Overclocking

    According to the prolific overclocker, the new 7nm chips can be pushed to higher frequencies if you increase the frequencies of the individual CCXs (chiplets) instead of OC’ing the entire CPU or the cores individually. This way you can clock each quad-core cluster separately as per their highest limit and achieve better scores on Cinebench and other benchmarking applications.

    This experiment was conducted using a Ryzen 9 3900X on an ASUS ROG X570-F Gaming, paired with 16GB of DDR4 RAM @ 3200MHz

    der8auer was able to yield a score 3432 points in Cinebench R15 using this overclocking method which is notably higher than what he got using traditional means. This can be easily explained as follows:

    AMD uses the chiplet based design for its Ryzen processors, meaning multiple 7nm dies are connected together using the Infinity Fabric on the substrate and often, not all of them come from the same source, resulting in different overclocking capabilities per CCX (varying silicon quality per chiplet), resulting in this behavior.

    Idle Power Consumption of Less than 10W

    Another remarkable feature of the Ryzen 3000 chips that this gentleman has discovered is related to the idle power consumption. On measuring it, he found that when there’s absolutely no load, the power draw drops to under 10W. This is the lowest TDP ever seen in case of a desktop-grade CPU (courtesy of the new 7nm process). However, if you use any application, even if it’s CPU-Z or HWinfo, the power consumption spikes, only to fall back a few moments after you leave the PC idle. This is possibly one of the features that allow Zen 2 chips to minimize their power draw. Here’s the vid:

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