Should I turn "AMD Cool n' Quiet" on or off?

[MoonlightSylv]

So there's a setting in my BIOS called "AMD Cool n' Quiet" which is supposed to turn down the CPU clock speed and voltage when you don't need it similar to Intel speedstep. Should I turn this on or off? It doesn't seem to effect my Cinebench score but would it improve/decrease the lifespan of my CPU or make something unstable?

[rn8686]

Dont think it would really increase lifespan of CPU much, but the fans would be quieter (Less heat for them to move). No reason not to do it. 

[Skiiwee29]

I would keep it on personally unless you notice an affect on your performance. Having lower temps overall would be a boost when the chip doesnt need the juice and less noise... worth it IMO. 

[Techicolors]

for some reason having it enabled messes up overclocking for me. like it'll suddenly downclock to 1550mhz and get stuck, only way to fix is rebooting. so i leave it off. the CPU runs at full clocks all the time tho

[Nikolacar4]

Well it basicly lowers the clock speeds on ur cpu when not needed. Its 100% worth it,tho if it messes ur overclocking  then if u turn it off u are shorting the lifespan (not much),and u are getting your coolers much louder. If u need an oc guide for fx series check out jayztwocents guide.

[MoonlightSylv]

Spoiler

17 minutes ago, rn8686 said:

Dont think it would really increase lifespan of CPU much, but the fans would be quieter (Less heat for them to move). No reason not to do it. 

 

15 minutes ago, legacy99 said:

I would keep it on personally unless you notice an affect on your performance. Having lower temps overall would be a boost when the chip doesnt need the juice and less noise... worth it IMO. 

 

12 minutes ago, Technicolors said:

for some reason having it enabled messes up overclocking for me. like it'll suddenly downclock to 1550mhz and get stuck, only way to fix is rebooting. so i leave it off. the CPU runs at full clocks all the time tho

 

8 minutes ago, Nikolacar4 said:

Well it basicly lowers the clock speeds on ur cpu when not needed. Its 100% worth it,tho if it messes ur overclocking  then if u turn it off u are shorting the lifespan (not much),and u are getting your coolers much louder. If u need an oc guide for fx series check out jayztwocents guide.

 

Task manager says it runs at 3.2-3.7GHz but HWMonitor says it's minimum and maximum is 3.8GHz, which one should I trust?

 

 

[Nikolacar4]

That is really a problem huh? I'd say go with task manager.... Reset ur cmos. And then start oc and tell mr what happens?

[MoonlightSylv]

Just now, Nikolacar4 said:

Reset ur cmos. And then start oc and tell mr what happens?

That's a bit extreme for this "problem" imo

 

Also I have a Ryzen CPU not an FX CPU.

[Skiiwee29]

4 minutes ago, ShadowTechXTS said:

That's a bit extreme for this "problem" imo

 

Also I have a Ryzen CPU not an FX CPU.

Realistically, unless you notice a performance degradation such as really low FPS in games, bad benchmarking scores attributed to CPU usage etc.. leave it on. 

[SwirlingMist]

It’s been a feature of processors for a long time, so it’s almost like it’s baked into everything else as an expected behavior which everything has been built around.  I think it may play into stability if you’re right on the edge of your systems power budget, as the sudden ramp from a low state to a high state may have an instantaneous draw in excess of what would exist in a stable state.  Maybe…

 

In a similar, adjusting the minimum clock speed to be closer to the boost clock may alleviate such a power surge demand.  Which comes in the form of current when the system maintains stable voltage, as is usually how it goes.  We see in the AMD Adrenaline graphics software they have sliders for minimum and maximum boost clock.  Some of the overclocking videos on seen advocate raising the minimum to very close to the max boost.  I reason that it’s useful to set the minimum to an integer ratio with the DDR ram speed and the infinity fabric, in couples mode.  So if it’s 1800 fabric clock in coupled mode with 3600 DDR4  I reason raising the minimum graphics clock to 900, 1800, 2700, or 3600 would be an optimization, especially if done with the vram and using Smart-Access memory to have the cpu access the gpu ram, in my mind the vram dram and the infinity fabric clock would all benefit being coupled at the same speed but I’m not sure. 
 

So similarly I think of the AMD cool and quiet function which is a cpu technology, in a similar way.  It allows for down clocking to save power, but maybe instability when it ramps from that low state, so maybe limiting that ramp distance would help if encountering instability.  But maybe the graphics is drawing more power as it ramps, and having the cpu at a lower power state would provide more headroom for the GPU to ramp wildly. In that scenario running the processor at a higher minimum state would just be sapping total system power for the galloping GPU. As the time of writing this, GPU’s have power spikes that double their power consumption, going from say 300w to 600w!  I think cpus also scale similarly when they spike, if doubling from say 50 watts to 100watts. So naturally the 300w gpu jump just is more the issue of sucking up all the power and crashing the system. But it’s likely there are situations where they both ramp at the same time, so the cpu could still be considered part of that ramping surge in amps that trips the over-current protection of the power supply, shutting down the system.