I recently had the opportunity to get some hands-on time with a Ryzen system for the first time. 3600 with stock cooler in a Tomahawk max (affordable but well recommended board). I've got some good news and bad news as a result.
The bad news is that, unless this is somehow a one-off fluke/defect, we've been greatly mislead about the degree to which these CPUs automatically choose the best settings for performance, thermals, etc. Prior to this, I was of the belief that you basically get ideal performance out of the box, and if not, a simple toggle of PBO or auto-overclocking would get you there. Certainly manual might squeeze out a few more percent but it was complex and thus not really worth it. This it seems couldn't be further from the truth. PBO and auto-overclocking do literally nothing, and out of the box, the chip is running at or even well beyond the maximum recommended safe voltage (~1.33 - 1.45 v), and despite this, scoring nearly 10% under the promised boost speed of 4.2 GHz.
The good news is that in the end this was very easy to rectify. Not only is manual overclocking extremely simple (just set voltage and all-core speed), but it is able to squeeze out what amounts of basically an entire generational leap's worth of improvement. The chip now runs 4.25 GHz all cores at just 1.15 v.
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Yeah as a budget chip it's not going to match a 3900x or anything like that in terms of raw speed, but we're both quite happy with this for what it is. AMD only promises 4.2 GHz tops anyway, so the single-core performance is actually improved over stock, despite also massively improving the all-core performance by getting it to all do that speed at once. I know the bigger chips get complicated in this regard where unless you really put in some time, you end up giving up single-core boost in order to raise all-core speeds, but thankfully that hasn't been an issue here. I think there's a good chance it could even do more with more voltage, of which there is plenty of room to increase, but due to the stock cooler we can't really afford that.
- The Blackhat, TopHatProductions115 and Ben17
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