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3900x 4.3GHz OC not boosting in games

Hey guys so I've built a new computer system with a 3900x which I've OC'd to 4.3GHz all cores stable. However when playing games the cores all stay at super low clocks and my GPU usage gets massively bottlenecked at around 45%.

In AIDA64, Blender, and Cinebench I see all 12 cores running at 4.3GHz just fine but in games I'm seeing them running at around 2.8-3.8GHz and performance definitely seems to be suffering greatly for it. Now I understand games don't utilize many cores but I'd expect at least the 2-4 cores that they do use to be running at higher clockspeeds. So far I've seen this behavior in Final Fantasy XV, Far Cry 5, and Red Dead Redemption; planning to test more, Red Dead Redemption does however have higher GPU usage than the other games.

Here's the complete system specs:

 

- 3900x 4.3GHz OC (overclocked using offsets, vcore fluctuates between about 1.24-1.26v depending on load, Ryzen master seems to incorrectly report this. LLC on medium

- 360mm Custom water cooling loop for CPU

- 3200MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX ram. Running at 3133MHz though as I have all four DIMMS filled and it wasn't stable at 3200MHz

- Gigabyte x570 Aorus Master

- RTX 2080Ti Strix OC (air cooled)

 

This is a fresh install of Windows 10 and I'm running the latest BIOS and all motherboard drivers.

 

I've attached a screenshot of my system's stats while playing Final Fantasy XV. By the way don't mind the 90° max tdie temperature in hwinfo, I was doing a torture test earlier before testing games and it spiked for a split second at some point during the test but was at ~83° for the rest of it. CPU temps during gaming are 55-60°

 

Capture.PNG

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Why you would ever OC Zen 2 CPU all-core for gaming ? It's stock boost are higher than anything you can achieve all-core, just let PBO do it's work.

Tag or quote me so i see your reply

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OC or not Zen2 won't boost unless it feels the need to, so regardless its not going to with a 3900x and modern games.  Its normal behavior. 

If you wanted to validate if its helping best bet is run benchmark for games you play, and ideally leave some monitoring software in backround that can graph clockspeeds per core, if default is boosting more then the OC has no point.  At very least leave software open, run benchmark check average and 1% and .1% lows. 
 

49 minutes ago, Juular said:

Why you would ever OC Zen 2 CPU all-core for gaming ? It's stock boost are higher than anything you can achieve all-core, just let PBO do it's work.

 

Depends on BIOS version, CPU, and motherboard, but in games that use all the cores available, with correctly configured OC it will run cooler and faster, really more useful on 3600 or 3700 though which might actually see 60-70% utilization in some games, graphical benchmarks, and absolutely in production workloads (in this case even 3900 and 3950x benefit).  But with what OP is experiencing i'd agree there isn't really a need for it, its possible he actually could be leaving performance on the table.  If you look up various real benchmarks for this its notable 3600, 3700 both get better minimums and average (many games can use all their cores/threads), but ive noticed 3900x and 3950x in such case sometimes, often even, drop minimums a bit with only mild increase to FPS average, so not worth it given frametime stability>fps average. 

 

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@Otto_iii with R5 3600 probably, not so much R7 3700X for gaming at least, definitely a straight no for R9 3900X neither for gaming nor for MT workloads unless you really can't cool it off with PBO and some negative vCore offset (i guess that's not an issue with 360mm custom loop).

Tag or quote me so i see your reply

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I'm happy to learn if im wrong, especially regarding to core-speed spikes during actual gaming, but this is my best understanding. What i know from my own and others experiences is i'd be surprised if it boosted as cleanly as manual OC utilizing same average voltage.  PBO and Auto-OC didn't seem worth bothering with after a few rounds of testing, regardless of config. 

The thing is with default it might hit 4.4-4.5ghz for a few seconds initially loading a program, loading a web browser, etc but then never does again in a sustained workload, even a minor one, and will swing below to say 4.2ghz and stay there, with a OC in this case the cores will still go back up to 4.3ghz if demand is high enough even after half a hour of work and running in 70C range. And i'm very certain there is no exception to the rule all-core OC is superior for multi-threaded tasks even on 3900x, 3950x, heck even TR3, all the benchmarkers i trust have all shown this whether it be GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, JayzTwoCents etc

Regardless of all this, yes, one can definitely argue a manual OC on Zen2 isn't that worth it, buying decent ram (or tweaking it if you feel confident) is likely much more worthwhile, especially on the CPUs with 2 CCDs that incur extra latency when swapping tasks between CCDs (Process Lasso being popular work around for this)

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Yes I get Ryzen will only boost if it needs to but what I'm saying is it does need to. It's painfully obvious these games are incredibly CPU bottlenecked so I don't know why on earth the CPU isn't boosting even just 2 cores. I mean the cores aren't even running at BASE frequency for the love of god.
The reason I manually OC'd it was because with PBO and auto OC enabled and all power limits at max the processor would never go above 4.1GHz except for maybe the ocassional 4.4GHz for a few miliseconds while opening a browser tab or something else stupidly light. I do heavy video editing and 3D animation on top of gaming and manual OCing gave me a 11% improvement in Cinebench over PBO + Auto OC. Also in GamersNexus' review of the CPU their all core overclock did better in every game they tested, granted it varied between 1-10fps depending on the title. But it definitely wasn't worse in any games.

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5 hours ago, gabriel101x said:

3200MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX ram. Running at 3133MHz though as I have all four DIMMS filled and it wasn't stable at 3200MHz

Try setting the clock, voltage, and timings manually.

 

Do this by first enabling XMP, go to timings menu, change timing mode to manual, then manually enter the timings to match what the bios shows to the left.

Then go back, disable XMP, those timings you entered should still be there. Now you can set frequency to 3200, voltage 1.35v and you should be stable.

Now you can save an exit, and cross your fingers!

 

I have the same Corsair LPX 3200 memory (4x 8GB), and on a Gigabyte X399 Gaming 7 board, i could not get XMP to work, but after entering the clock, volts, timings manually, the board was finally properly stable. Gigabytes AMD BIOSes have some annoying quirks.

 

As for the boosting, what about setting to windows high performance profile? That'll lock clocks to max all the time. If you have C-States Enabled then it'll still allow the cores to go to low power modes so it shouldn't sit burning itself up. At least, that worked on my 1950X / X399.

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18 hours ago, ValkyrieStar said:

Try setting the clock, voltage, and timings manually.

 

Do this by first enabling XMP, go to timings menu, change timing mode to manual, then manually enter the timings to match what the bios shows to the left.

Then go back, disable XMP, those timings you entered should still be there. Now you can set frequency to 3200, voltage 1.35v and you should be stable.

Now you can save an exit, and cross your fingers!

 

I have the same Corsair LPX 3200 memory (4x 8GB), and on a Gigabyte X399 Gaming 7 board, i could not get XMP to work, but after entering the clock, volts, timings manually, the board was finally properly stable. Gigabytes AMD BIOSes have some annoying quirks.

 

As for the boosting, what about setting to windows high performance profile? That'll lock clocks to max all the time. If you have C-States Enabled then it'll still allow the cores to go to low power modes so it shouldn't sit burning itself up. At least, that worked on my 1950X / X399.

I tried that with the memory and it put my system into a bootloop. I had to clear the CMOS just to get POST. If you're running 8GB sticks they'd be single rank probably, I'm running 4x 16GB sticks which are dual rank so more taxing on the memory controller afaik. Threadripper has a stronger memory controller than regular Ryzen I believe.
I'll try Windows Ryzen high performance mode.
 

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probably dumb question but you atleast installed recent chipset drivers and set to high performance, right?  as dumb and basic as it sounds i found it helped alot compared to not being applied, but this should be fairly pedestrian knowledge.

When i sperged out about overclocking i didn't mean offsets, just set a damn voltage, find stable core, and go with that, the system isn't design for you, gamers must rise above

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I was already on high performance mode but had minimum processor speed set to 1%, I tried setting it to 100% and restarting and it made zero difference and didn't peg cores at max speed at all; most cores were still at 2.5GHz. I'm running the latest chipset drivers from AMD's website.
I actually just tried comparing PBO vs 4.3GHz OC in Far Cry benchmark and there's no difference, the 4.3GHz oc had 1 more fps in average and maximum fps and the exact same minimum fps.
By the way when I try PBO with Cinebench single core benchmark it never boosts over 4.1GHz. It fluctuates a ton and sits at 2.5GHz to 3.5GHz for most of the benchmark on 2 cores while the rest sleep. My Cinebench scores are within margin of error of the ones reviewers have gotten though, so it seems they must be experiencing the same behavior.

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