There is something very wrong with AMD’s Ryzen 3000 clock speeds. Whether it’s temp throttling, power, poor binning, or a combination of those three, few 3rd Gen Ryzen parts are reaching their advertised speeds at stock settings. The folks over at Tom’s Hardware tried to see what would happen with liquid nitrogen cooling: At -180 degrees Celsius, where the temperature is obviously no longer a potential factor. What they found was shocking:
The Ryzen 3700X at stock settings refused to hit the advertised peak frequencies, even at a temperature colder than the surface of Mars. Is binning responsible, then, or is it a software issue? If poor binning was the cause, then manual overclocks would cause crashes if the processor is cranked up to its advertised speed. However, they tried that as well and the 3700X seemed quite happy to run, albeit hotter and consuming more power.
They did find that enabling the “fixed overclocking” mode in the BIOS allowed the processor to maintain peak speeds without dropping. This indicates that the Ryzen speed issue could at least partly be due to kinks in AMD’s BIOS-level code. Let’s see how this pans out.
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