questions about amd ryzen

aren332 · April 21

what is percision boost overdrive? take 5600x for example. it boosts up to 4.6ghz. with pbo will it boost higher till temp limited? will it damage the cpu in any way? i need to know the whole pbo lore

what is memory training? when does it happen? do all ryzen cpus have it? why do intel cpus not have? i need to know the whole memory training lore, including how it works on intel.

Is it true that ryzen is optimized for gaming (not just the x3d models)? how does that work? does that mean ryzen is bad for other tasks compared to intel? for example the 5600x is equavalent to a 12400f. Will they both perform similarly in all tasks? or will the ryzen slightly lag behind in productivity tasks?

Is it true that some ryzen cpus favor 3600mhz ram? which cpus? is the 5600x one of them?

is it true that ryzen cpus overclock generally worse than intel cpus? or is that a thing in the past?

Levent · April 21

PBO will boost until it hits TDC, EDC, PPT or thermal limits. Usually first three are set high enough that you are almost always thermally limited.

Memory training happens on every platform. Intel or AMD. It fills up the required timings that are not defined in XMP or default profiles.

Ryzen is not optimized for gaming. X3D models work better because they have more cache.

Zen3 tends to have 3600mhz as the acceptable level for DRAM frequency.

It depends.

RONOTHAN## · April 21

1 hour ago, aren332 said:

what is percision boost overdrive?

The boost algorithm. This gets the max clock speed to within 100MHz of what the chip is capable at all times. There are ways to tune it by messing with limits and the curve optimizer, though it gets you an extra 2-3% at most and is not really worth it most of the time.

1 hour ago, aren332 said:

what is memory training? when does it happen? do all ryzen cpus have it? why do intel cpus not have? i need to know the whole memory training lore, including how it works on intel.

Every platform has memory training, not just AMD. It's the memory controller learning the memory effectively, running test patterns to see what internal parameters and timings it needs to run to get the memory to worm.

1 hour ago, aren332 said:

Is it true that ryzen is optimized for gaming (not just the x3d models)? how does that work? does that mean ryzen is bad for other tasks compared to intel? for example the 5600x is equavalent to a 12400f. Will they both perform similarly in all tasks? or will the ryzen slightly lag behind in productivity tasks

Look at benchmark results from both chips, the 12400 and 5600X are within margin of error in basically everything. One isn't optimized for gaming and the other isn't optimized for productivity.

1 hour ago, aren332 said:

Is it true that some ryzen cpus favor 3600mhz ram? which cpus? is the 5600x one of them

Kinda. 3600MT/s is the best performance no effort memory speed that you can run since it works on every Ryzen 3000/5000 series chip in 1:1:1 mode (a massive latency benefit, outside of Geekbench you pretty much always want to be in 1:1:1 mode). If you put a little bit of work into it, 3800-4000 can work in 1:1:1 mode, so those can be faster.

1 hour ago, aren332 said:

is it true that ryzen cpus overclock generally worse than intel cpus? or is that a thing in the past

Yes and no, but that doesn't really matter. You have less settings to mess with on AMD, so tuning doesn't take as long and you don't get as far, plus doing a static OC on Ryzen leads to worse single core performance and in some instances lower multi-threaded performance (my 5900X, for instance, if fully stability tested would max out at 4.55GHz, and that resulted in ~500 points less in Cinebench than tuned PBO, though other tests went up). Intel on the other hand has overclocking the old fashioned way generally be better than a manual OC still, though modern -K SKUs have such little head room that you with the exception of the 13600K or golden samples you get 200-300MHz at most extra clock speed. If you get a locked 12th gen and a board with an external clock gen to overclock with instead, then you actually get good headroom and something worth overclocking, but something like a 12600K or 13900K, not worth it.