PBO on Ryzen 7 3700X yea or nay?

[AncientPistol]

I have built a new PC with AMD Ryzen 3700X. So far, other than enabling XMP and changing the fan curves a bit, I have not touched anything in the BIOS, everything is stock. Running some CPU benchmarks I have found that the CPU stays in the mid-high 60s under full synthetic load thanks to my Kraken X63 AIO. I am wondering if I should enable PBO and what kind of performance gains I should expect from it. I use the PC mostly for gaming.

 

I saw in a video somewhere that PBO can push the voltage above 1.4V which I don't think is very healthy for the CPU and that the performance gains are not worth it. I want to get any extra performance I can get for free but definitely not at the cost of CPU life or stability. I use my PC for  8-10 hrs a day and want to go at least 3-4 years before upgrading the CPU, then there is also the fact that enabling PBO will void my warranty. So, what do you guys suggest?

 

Full parts list - 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	$279.99 @ Amazon
CPU Cooler	NZXT Kraken X63 98.17 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler	$149.99 @ Best Buy
Motherboard	MSI MPG B550 GAMING EDGE WIFI ATX AM4 Motherboard
Memory	G.Skill Trident Z RGB 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory	$83.99 @ Newegg
Storage	Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive	$69.98 @ Amazon
Storage	Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$54.99 @ Newegg
Video Card	Asus GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB STRIX GAMING Advanced Video Card	$584.99 @ Best Buy
Case	NZXT H510 ATX Mid Tower Case	$69.99 @ Best Buy
Power Supply	Corsair TXM Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	$1293.92
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-07-31 10:44 EDT-0400

 

[5x5]

Enable it. It's free performance in your case.

[Mateyyy]

Give it a shot, and see how much extra performance you get for how much extra power draw/heat output. If it's worth it to you, keep it on. Not all chips will benefit a whole lot from PBO though, so don't get your expectations too high.

 

Even if PBO as with any other overclocking does void your warranty on paper, if you ever actually need to RMA your chip to AMD, just don't tell them that it was overclocked. Or if you tell them, just create another ticket 10 minutes later.

[Master Disaster]

The amount of degradation PBO will cause is so miniscule it really doesn't matter. You've already said your cooler can easily handle the CPU as is, all PBO will do is increase the temp/power limits on the CPU so it can boost a little higher for a little longer and as long as your cooler can handle the extra heat there's no reason to not enable it.

 

Also no, PBO will not force 1.4v onto the CPU, that's not how it works. It increases the built in safety limits, it does not touch voltage in any way. I think whoever told you that didn't understand how Zen 2 operates properly. 1.4v is actually normal & expected on Zen 2 when the CPU is doing single threaded boosting, it's how the CPU pushes the 2 fastest cores to that much higher Single Core boost speed. New users see this and immediately think its going to destroy the CPU but it really isn't, remember most of the CPU cores are parked and idle, when its applying 1.4v its only ever 1 or 2 cores receiving it.

[AncientPistol]

6 hours ago, Mateyyy said:

Give it a shot, and see how much extra performance you get for how much extra power draw/heat output. If it's worth it to you, keep it on. Not all chips will benefit a whole lot from PBO though, so don't get your expectations too high.

 

Even if PBO as with any other overclocking does void your warranty on paper, if you ever actually need to RMA your chip to AMD, just don't tell them that it was overclocked. Or if you tell them, just create another ticket 10 minutes later.

So I went to the BIOS and switched from PBO Auto to Enabled. Running benchmarks my scores have improved by about 1-2% and temps have gone up by 1-2C also under full load. Nothing insane but its free performance so I won't complain.

 

I did see a few other options though, Enhanced 1 - 4. What are these? Should I try them?

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, AncientPistol said:

So I went to the BIOS and switched from PBO Auto to Enabled. Running benchmarks my scores have improved by about 1-2% and temps have gone up by 1-2C also under full load. Nothing insane but its free performance so I won't complain.

 

I did see a few other options though, Enhanced 1 - 4. What are these? Should I try them?

If you use the enhancer turn off PBO.

 

Lvl 3 and 4 are high cpu all core clocks. However once under load, depending on temps, that all cor boost may be lower.

 

You also have sensemi  offset that will increase your all core clocks too. 

 

Each setting that over clocks the cpu must be done by itself to prevent conflicts.

 

[AncientPistol]

21 hours ago, ShrimpBrime said:

If you use the enhancer turn off PBO.

How can I turn off PBO and use enhancer? The enhancer options are in the PBO section itself-  Auto, Enable, Disable, Enhanced 1-4 and Advanced.

21 hours ago, ShrimpBrime said:

Lvl 3 and 4 are high cpu all core clocks. However once under load, depending on temps, that all cor boost may be lower.

Since my primary focus is gaming, I am looking for single core boost if possible, don't care much about all core boost. Should I try options 1 and 2 to see if I get better single core scores?

 

21 hours ago, ShrimpBrime said:

You also have sensemi  offset that will increase your all core clocks too. 

I am not familiar with that, where can I find this?

[SFFDesigns]

On 7/31/2020 at 11:28 AM, Master Disaster said:

remember most of the CPU cores are parked and idle, when its applying 1.4v its only ever 1 or 2 cores receiving it.

This explains why when you run a benchmark like Cinebench, everything goes down to around 1.3V since all cores are loaded. 

 

22 minutes ago, AncientPistol said:

Since my primary focus is gaming, I am looking for single core boost if possible, don't care much about all core boost. Should I try options 1 and 2 to see if I get better single core scores?

 

I'd just keep PBO. For me, my average core clock during a game (XP11) that loads 1 or 2 cores was around 4.1GHz consistently, which was a small improvement. I haven't tried enhancer though, so I'm not 100% sure. I only know that PBO helped out a bit!

[Guest]

37 minutes ago, AncientPistol said:

How can I turn off PBO and use enhancer? The enhancer options are in the PBO section itself-  Auto, Enable, Disable, Enhanced 1-4 and Advanced.

Since my primary focus is gaming, I am looking for single core boost if possible, don't care much about all core boost. Should I try options 1 and 2 to see if I get better single core scores?

 

I am not familiar with that, where can I find this?

Auto is disabled, and disabled is disabled. 

Not sure why they even included auto, but I think it has something to do with Ryzen Master and overclocking on the fly, where you can enable PBO in windows via the Ryzen Master application. 

Enhancer levels 1 and 2 won't be much different than stock boost frequencies. Level 3 and 4 will be higher all core boost frequencies and where most of the gains are at.

 

There's not many games that would lean on a single core boost.

But if that's what you really want, the stock single core boost is the fastest.

-So then you'd just revert the system to stock settings and enjoy.

 

SenseMi on some ROG boards in the tweakers tab (if memory serves today) has settings SenseMi Skew and SenseMi Offset. Skew alters when boosting happens and Offset increases or decreases all core boost clocks. All while still being reliant on having good cpu temps.

 

All this fine and dandy, but in the end, your load temps are important. So do keep an eye on it.