Ryzen 36 - ""Safe"" Voltages ?

Hekate · December 26, 2019

I have a few questions regarding the voltages on the Ryzen 5 3600. After I assembled my new Rig a few days ago I was quite unhappy with the behaviour of my R5 3600, it would constantly jump around between 30 – 45c°at idle, causing my fans to perpetually ramp up and then again slow down. It was quite annoying.

In my attempts at fixing this, I encountered the high idle voltages of the R5 at around 1.45v. After researching a bit the principle is basically, at least from what I understood, that the voltages are high under low load or high single core load, but it is supposed to have lower voltages under sustained heavy multi core load.

Now to fix my original problem I manually overclocked it to 4.2 ghz at a set 1.3 core voltage, while disabling “precision boost” and enabling “Amd cool and quiet”. So far the system appears to be quite stable, though I admit I did not subject it to sustained testing. But there haven’t been any problems while running prime95 for around 30 minutes or the occasional gaming I did since then.

The idle temps are down to a stable 28c° and under load I am at around 65c° max. Cinebench R15 gives me around 1670 for multicore and around 198 for single core. All in all I am quite happy.

But there is still a voice of concern in the back of my head. All over the place they tell you not to mess with the stock settings for the R5 3600 since it would mess with the “high voltage with no load – low voltage under high load” principle for no performance gain. So what voltages does it actually use with stock settings under load ? And more importantly am I in danger of degrading my CPU with my sustained 1.3v ?

Thanks for helping me out.

Krunkkracker · December 26, 2019

The safe voltage level comes from Stilt's research on overclock.net and 1.325 is the voltage usually used under load at stock settings: https://www.overclock.net/forum/10-amd-cpus/1728758-strictly-technical-matisse-not-really.html

To solve your first issue, you could have just adjusted your fan profile in your BIOS to only ramp up after 50c or so. Idle temperatures mean very little.

1.3v core voltage is very reasonably safe, especially for only 4.2ghz where the current draw will be minor. Degradation happens all the time but 1.3v/4.2ghz shouldn't be noticeable increase over stock, if at all.