AMD revealed its upcoming Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs earlier this year at Computex. These third generation chips, based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture, have been received quite well by everyone and the hopes for these processors are really high.
Now, in a recent event in London, AMD talked about the overclocking capabilities of these new chips. Talking to PCGamersN, Travis Kirsch from AMD explained the overclocking prowess of different chips from the Ryzen 3000 series.
Kirsch said, “I think the top of the stack, you’re going to be fairly limited initially. You know, with our boost algorithms, we eke out just about everything you can get. So maybe a couple hundred megahertz. With the 65W parts, you’ll get a lot more because their specs are run with lower power. So you can overclock the thing, get all the power of it, and, obviously, you get more headroom out of it.”
So according to Kirsch, the lower power chips, like the 65 W Ryzen 7 3700X will be the best option for overclocking since there’s more scope for squeezing more power as compared to the higher end Ryzen 9 chips whose TDP goes as high as 105 W. Lower power chips will operate at a relatively lower temperature normally which obviously gives more freedom for overclocking than a chip which works at a higher temperature in normal conditions.
Kirsch does admit that they haven’t tested these chips long enough to know the complete overclocking capacity, but even these comments give us a fair idea about what to expect from these chips in terms of overclocking when they hit the market.
Kirsch said, “We haven’t had it in the lab for a long enough time to really understand the capabilities with overclocking, so I think we’ll be surprised what people can do.”
Kirsch pointed out two specific chips in the whole series, 3900X and 3700X. He explains, “I look at it like there’s two great parts in the stack. One is the 3900X, that’s the part everybody’s gonna want, but the 3700X is the part everyone needs. It does everything.”
“I think this is an important part for us because it sets the foundation of everything we do and it’s the right target for most buyers. So, you get elite gaming performance and content creation performance, it’s very competitive with 9900K, you’ve got the most, and fastest connectivity on the market with PCIe Gen 4, X570 motherboards, it’s overclockable, and it’s got solder TIM.”
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12-core, 24 thread CPU aimed at gaming and is the flagship chip of the 3000 series. It has a TDP of 105 W and cache of 70 MB. The base clock speed sits at 3.8 GHz which can shoot up to 4.6 GHz on boost. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X will retail for a price of $499 and will be available from 7th July. The 3900X is designed to perform with heavy multi-threaded loads.
On the other hand, is the Ryzen 7 3700X with 8 cores and 16 threads. The 65W chip has a clock speed of 3.6 GHz which can be boosted up to 4.4 GHz. This chip competes against the 8 core, 8 thread Intel Core i7-9700K and provides significant improvement in multi-thread performance as compared to the Intel offering. At a price of just $329, this could be a game changer in the gaming market.
Further Reading:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 ($199) Beats Intel’s Core i7-9700K ($374) in Cinebench
Chinese Zhaoxin CPU as Fast as AMD Ryzen 7 2700U in Geekbench MC Test
Chinese x86 Zhaoxin KX-6000 CPU on Par with Intel’s Core i5-7400
7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU w/ 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)