Did you keep your ryzen overclocked?

[lupaz]

Hi all,

After reading a comment by Juraj on another thread, I decided to remove the overclocking I've done to my ryzen 1800.

My fan had to go too fast and the noise was distracting.

I was wondering if you guys noticed a real world, everyday difference in performance between OC and not.

I do, but I'm not sure if it's auto suggestive.

Thanks.

[Juraj]

What comment of mine :- ) ? Heh it sounds like I advised against over-clocking, but I was probably just ranting about noise.

Overclocking is very easy thing today (even one-button with auto-systems) but building overclockable and silent system is still art.

Regarding noticing OC:
- All the chips on market have high turbo clocks which apply to 1 or 2 cores and that is all the speed-up you will notice when using general workstation tasks. With Ryzen/Threadripper you won't achieve much higher total clocks due to architecture so you won't feel your PC being any more faster/responsive outside of rendering.
- Overclocking mainly gives benefit of keeping all the clocks high and this will show only during rendering phase. Imho it's good to be reasonable here and settle for goldilocks clocks/heat/noise ratio as additional 10perc. speedup is hardly worth for the excessive heat and noise, esp. if it will bring down 2 hours of render time into 1h45min. Renderfarm is the proper solution to faster render-time (for CPU renderers).

[lupaz]

Hi Juraj.

You weren't advising against it.
You said something like CPU rendering shouldn't be noisy if things are done right.

Yes, I think for just a 10% it would've been better not to OC in the first place.
There were people saying it was stupid not to overclock being so easy, but...not worth it.

[Juraj]

There are many factors that can influence it, and some of them you can't help much:

- "Silicon lottery" - Some chip yields are better than other, and one lucky buyer might overclock higher at lower voltage leading, giving them better performance and chip that needs less cooling. Not much to do about this, but with Ryzen/Threadripper this isn't much issue since this isn't big overclocker  in first place.
- Auto-overclocking is designed to stay on the 'conservative' side ( which will guarantee a stable system ) but may use too much voltage, leading to more heat, which in return will require more cooling and hence noise. Manual over-clocking might (and might not) produce better result by finding the lowest stable voltage necessary. Only for some unoptimized Adobe soft (like Premiere) to crash your system anyway :- )

- It makes some people uncomfortable, but the chips are mostly ok at high operating temperatures. 80+ C might seems like a lot, but they were designed to sustain it, so if you want more silent system, simply lower the RPM of fans. Your system won't transfer the heat away so efficiently, but it will be silent. The potential downside might be that your CPU will not live forever but they for sure will still live more than is their moral lifespan.

-How and where you mount the fans. Top mounted fans are most efficient pull setup to dissipate heat away from case but it's also the most noisy one.
-Always buy damped cases like Fractal Define series. It's not as fancy as full acrylic side-panel cases but it's few more decibels lesser.

[Rimas]

I'll add that from experience CPUs almost never die, especially post 2000 chips with Watchdog functionality - if anything happens (overheating, too much or not enough current or voltage, etc) Watchdog just shuts the system down.
The only CPU I ever had die on me was my i7-5960X due to a power surge in the house this winter (and yeah, I was dumb enough not to have a surge protector, lol). But Intel replaced my CPU within 3 days, which was epic, and now I have an even better chip that wants less voltage at 4.5GHz - great for keeping them temps down!

My 5960X is a funace of a CPU, as most owners will know, but a Corsair Hydro H115i cooler with two Noctua Industrial 140mm fans keeps my system as quiet under load as it is when idle - but I do let the CPU operate at ~75-83'C under load as a trade-off for quietness - CPUs are designed to sustain this without problem. I think throttling begins at 92'C for my CPU, but I don't think mine would trigger under manual OC settings.

Overclocking generally now is much easier than it was back in the day, as Juraj said. Thing is, however - AMD isn't really good at it. You can squeeze out a lot from Intel CPUs (my 5960X went from 3.2GHz all 8-core to 4.5GHz and could reach 4.6 or 4.7GHz if I had proper watercooling), but AMD are already pretty much on the line without much wiggle room.

What you CAN do for extra speed with Threadripper/Ryzen is use fast RAM, since AMD's "infinity fabric" interconnect between CPU dyes is very sensitive to DRAM speed (great concept, bad execution, won't go into technical details).