AMD Cool'n'Quiet doesn't work?

[Marshen]

I've noticed that AMD Cool'n'Quiet has stopped working for my Ryzen 5 3600 and the CPU frequency stays constant at 3600MHz even on idle. I've disabled Core Performance Boost and PBO in the BIOS because it shoots up my temperature into the high 80s. I also went into the windows power options and cycled between Ryzen Balanced, regular balanced and regular powersave but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I've double checked if the minimum processor state is set to 5% and it is.

What am I missing here? Any help would be appreciated!

System specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX (BIOS v3.50)
GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
2x8GB DDR4 RAM @3200MHz

[Metallus97]

Chipset drivers and stuff up to date, bios up to date?

[Marshen]

6 minutes ago, Metallus97 said:

Chipset drivers and stuff up to date, bios up to date?

Yup. I've downloaded and installed the latest chipset drivers through the AMD website and the latest BIOS via. MSI's Live Update utility.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I've tweaked with my processor on and off in the past month or two and I'm finding that Ryzen processors don't behave in the conventional manner that we're used to. The biggest one I've seen is that clock speed is not indicative of power draw. Ryzen also doesn't seem to automatically lower voltage below Vcore to save power (Intel's CPUs do this I believe). But I have measured a major power consumption difference and I don't have Cool 'N Quiet on. Judging by what monitoring tools are telling me, the way Ryzen's consume/save power is simply finding ways to limit how much current they use.

 

If you use a monitoring tool like HWMonitor or HWiNFO, it'll tell you the approximate power consumption the CPU is using.

[Metallus97]

8 minutes ago, Marshen said:

Yup. I've downloaded and installed the latest chipset drivers through the AMD website and the latest BIOS via. MSI's Live Update utility.

do you have an oc or some sort of auto oc from the mobo active?

Try to clear CMOS 

[Marshen]

26 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I've tweaked with my processor on and off in the past month or two and I'm finding that Ryzen processors don't behave in the conventional manner that we're used to. The biggest one I've seen is that clock speed is not indicative of power draw. Ryzen also doesn't seem to automatically lower voltage below Vcore to save power (Intel's CPUs do this I believe). But I have measured a major power consumption difference and I don't have Cool 'N Quiet on. Judging by what monitoring tools are telling me, the way Ryzen's consume/save power is simply finding ways to limit how much current they use.

 

If you use a monitoring tool like HWMonitor or HWiNFO, it'll tell you the approximate power consumption the CPU is using.

The thing is Cool'n'Quiet or even the power plans don't seem to have any effect whatsoever. I turned it on and off and there was absolutely no difference in the voltages, temps or the clock speed. MSI Afterburner and HWM both show my clock speed is stuck at 3600MHz however in Ryzen Master the speed seems to go up and down while the voltage stays constant. The same goes for power plans. Even if I change the min/max processor state, there is no difference. I'm just worried that something's not right and it's damaging my CPU.

A month or so ago when I first enabled cool n quiet, I do remember that Afterburner would show the processor downclock to around 2600MHz during idle. Here's a couple of screenshots of the current readings from HWM and Ryzen Master: https://imgur.com/a/QDypEsJ

25 minutes ago, Metallus97 said:

do you have an oc or some sort of auto oc from the mobo active?

Try to clear CMOS 

Not that I can think of. Everything is set to default except for Precision Boost Overdrive and Core Performance Boost both of which I've turned off because the temps are just too high on a stock cooler.

[Mira Yurizaki]

14 minutes ago, Marshen said:

The thing is Cool'n'Quiet or even the power plans don't seem to have any effect whatsoever. I turned it on and off and there was absolutely no difference in the voltages, temps or the clock speed. MSI Afterburner and HWM both show my clock speed is stuck at 3600MHz however in Ryzen Master the speed seems to go up and down while the voltage stays constant. The same goes for power plans. Even if I change the min/max processor state, there is no difference. I'm just worried that something's not right and it's damaging my CPU.

From what I observed with my 2700X, VCore doesn't change except when you're taxing the processor, in which it starts dropping (this is expected though). I've set a constant speed on it, but from what I recall when I didn't, it'd always float around base clock speeds unless I used the Power Saver power plan, in which it dropped to 2.2GHz, but there was no in-between speed.

 

The temperature thing has me curious, but if the third gen Ryzen is the same as the second gen in where there's only one temperature sensor, it reports the hottest thing, and there's constant temperature spikes, I wouldn't really worry unless it never goes below say 50C.

[Husky]

You should completely shut down any monitoring tools you are using (HWMonitor, HWiNFO64, Ryzen Master, etc...) and close Task Manager. Use CPU-Z to check the VCore and clock speed. There was a statement by AMD on their subreddit a while ago that many monitoring programs' polling methods cause the CPU to boost. They said that CPU-Z doesn't make the CPU boost as much as therefore is better at seeing the VCore and frequency. You should also be aware that Ryzen likes to rapidly put parts of the cores to sleep instead of just dropping the clockspeed which means that often times the frequency you see in monitoring programs is an outdated number from when the cores where doing work as the cores don't report their frequency when they are asleep so the monitoring program just displays the number from before the cores went to sleep which can make idle frequencies looks unusually high.

 

If the speeds and VCore are still high, make sure that CPPC and Cool 'n Quiet are enabled in the UEFI, and use the Ryzen Balanced Power Plan that came with the chipset drivers to get the 1ms clock selection provided by CPPC.

[miagisan]

52 minutes ago, Husky said:

You should completely shut down any monitoring tools you are using (HWMonitor, HWiNFO64, Ryzen Master, etc...) and close Task Manager. Use CPU-Z to check the VCore and clock speed. There was a statement by AMD on their subreddit a while ago that many monitoring programs' polling methods cause the CPU to boost. They said that CPU-Z doesn't make the CPU boost as much as therefore is better at seeing the VCore and frequency. You should also be aware that Ryzen likes to rapidly put parts of the cores to sleep instead of just dropping the clockspeed which means that often times the frequency you see in monitoring programs is an outdated number from when the cores where doing work as the cores don't report their frequency when they are asleep so the monitoring program just displays the number from before the cores went to sleep which can make idle frequencies looks unusually high.

 

If the speeds and VCore are still high, make sure that CPPC and Cool 'n Quiet are enabled in the UEFI, and use the Ryzen Balanced Power Plan that came with the chipset drivers to get the 1ms clock selection provided by CPPC.

as said above, you cannot use hwmonitor or hwinfo for monitor ryzen performance. Use Ryzen Master or CPUID. Also, make sure you enable CPPC or C-States in the bios.

[Marshen]

3 hours ago, miagisan said:

as said above, you cannot use hwmonitor or hwinfo for monitor ryzen performance. Use Ryzen Master or CPUID. Also, make sure you enable CPPC or C-States in the bios.

I used Ryzen Master and CPU-Z individually and the results were quite different. On Ryzen master, the peak clock keeps fluctuating between 400-800MHz on idle and it stayed at 3600MHz during load, whereas on CPU-Z it's a constant 3599.16MHz on idle and load. The core voltage seems to be around 1.008v on both softwares although I have no idea if this is too high or not.

Also, when I enable Cool'n'Quiet in my BIOS, a new "PSTATE" setting pops up and disappears again when I turn CnQ off.  What is this supposed to do? There's 3 options within the pstate setting: Pstate 0 ; 1 ; 2

[Metallus97]

14 hours ago, Marshen said:

I used Ryzen Master and CPU-Z individually and the results were quite different. On Ryzen master, the peak clock keeps fluctuating between 400-800MHz on idle and it stayed at 3600MHz during load, whereas on CPU-Z it's a constant 3599.16MHz on idle and load. The core voltage seems to be around 1.008v on both softwares although I have no idea if this is too high or not.

Also, when I enable Cool'n'Quiet in my BIOS, a new "PSTATE" setting pops up and disappears again when I turn CnQ off.  What is this supposed to do? There's 3 options within the pstate setting: Pstate 0 ; 1 ; 2

Idd trust  Ryzen master more than CPUZ since Master is directly form AMD.

Pastates are power saving standards. Try to experiment with them.

[Marshen]

12 hours ago, Metallus97 said:

Idd trust  Ryzen master more than CPUZ since Master is directly form AMD.

Pastates are power saving standards. Try to experiment with them.

After digging into this stuff a bit more, it does seem like HWInfo64 and Ryzen Master are the only ways to accurately measure the CPU's current clock and on both those apps, the frequencies do go up and down depending on usage. Perhaps the readings from HWM and Afterburner stopped working after the latest BIOS update. Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it!