der8auer on Ryzen 3000 Boosting : "It's Worse Than I Thought"

Tsing

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Overclocking guru der8auer had surveyed nearly 3,000 third-gen Ryzen CPU owners to get to the bottom of AMD's boosting controversy. The results are now in and not in the company's favor, especially with the higher-ended variants.

Only 5.6% of the Ryzen 9 3900X chips managed to hit their advertised boost speeds, for instance. Things were a little brighter for cheaper parts, such as the Ryzen 5 3600, which managed to see half boosting correctly.

Der8auer carefully selected the results that went into the survey, where he discarded any numbers that used either specialized cooling like water chillers, Precision Boost Overdrive - PBO or the results which were submitted by "fanboys" who wanted to game the result. Testing was purely scientific using Cinebench R15 and clock speeds were recorded using HWinfo (which got recommendation from AMD), so he could get as precise data as possible.
 
Anyone else's 3000 series chips saying "Engineering Sample" in HWiNFO or CPUZ?
 
der8auer isn't wrong. I've been doing testing on this and some of these CPU's simply can't boost to the correct clock speeds. There are some CPU's that can, but will only boost using the correct motherboard and memory combinations. This of course also assumes the other necessary variables such as cooling are where they need to be.
 
Dan_D said:
der8auer isn't wrong. I've been doing testing on this and some of these CPU's simply can't boost to the correct clock speeds. There are some CPU's that can, but will only boost using the correct motherboard and memory combinations. This of course also assumes the other necessary variables such as cooling are where they need to be.
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So, it's like....overclocking?
 
Only 5.6% of the Ryzen 9 3900X chips managed to hit their advertised boost speeds?!?! Well gawd dayaaaaaaaaaaaamn. That isn't cool at all.
 
May as well add AMD statement.Maybe this survey helped AMD put this statement out.

This came in from AMD seconds ago in regards to the Boost clock differential discussion. AMD is pleased with the strong momentum of 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processors in the PC enthusiast and gaming communities. We closely monitor community feedback on our products and understand that some 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen users are reporting boost clock speeds below the expected processor boost frequency.
While processor boost frequency is dependent on many variables including workload, system design, and cooling solution, we have closely reviewed the feedback from our customers and have identified an issue in our firmware that reduces boost frequency in some situations. We are in the process of preparing a BIOS update for our motherboard partners that addresses that issue and includes additional boost performance optimizations.
We will provide an update on September 10 to the community regarding the availability of the BIOS.
 
I sure hope they address it. And not in such a way as to make it appear as though the cores are boosting properly. The community will be testing.
 
Riccochet said:
I sure hope they address it. And not in such a way as to make it appear as though the cores are boosting properly. The community will be testing.
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Keep in mind that the benchmark results could drop even if the CPU boosts to the correct values. This has already happened before when AMD released earlier AGESA updates which resolved the boost clocking issues for some reviewers and the Ryzen 9 3900X. I wrote a separate article outlining what we saw testing the system after our boost clocking issues were resolved. Most benchmarks showed an almost insignificant difference. In some cases we saw some gains yes, but we also saw a reduction in performance in a couple of cases.

AMD probably can't win here. I'd wager this is exactly what we'll see from whatever AGESA code fix AMD releases next to address the boost clocking issue. Most of these CPU's aren't missing the mark by a wide margin. All the ones I've seen are less than 100MHz off. Sometimes by only half that. I don't expect the results to change dramatically in benchmarks one way or the other.
 
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