Did I lose the silicon lottery?

[Draydince]

I was debating for a long time over getting a Ryzen chip, or waiting for Coffee Lake. I waited unitl the solar eclipse reveal event, and no CL release so I pulled the trigger on Ryzen.

I got an Asrock X370 Taichi with the sole intent of overclocking in mind. Along with it, a 16gb kit of G.Skill Tridentz F4-3200C16D-16GTZKW and a Ryzen r5 1600 (I plan on upgrading to the 8 core version of Ryzen 2, or Ryzen+ whatever it's called later down the road, so this is more of a placeholder)

I upgraded to the latest bios, and am using a Scythe Mugen 5 cpu cooler with Kryonaut Grizzly paste. So obviously I don't have the "best" coolers, but I imagine it would be a decent little step up over the stock.

I've read many reports of people who are able to achieve 3.8ghz on the stock cooler alone, with headroom to spare.

With my setup, the absolute highest I am able to achieve is 3.8ghz with 1.312 volts. Temps aren't really an issue. During gaming they're in the low to mid 50's, and during stress testing (Prime95 and Intel Burn Test) they're about 65-66c max.

Did I completely lose the silicon lottery, or is this good for a Ryzen 1600? Just about every review on the chip I've seen states that 3.9-4ghz are easily reached. No matter how much voltage I put, I cannot touch any higher. Even with 1.41v I couldn't hit 3.9ghz and I really don't feel comfortable putting anymore voltage.

I'm also having an issue with my motherboard that if I manually overclock with a static voltage, the chip downclocks itself to 1.5ghz. No matter what ghz or voltage I have it set to. I have all power saving features disabled, and am set to prefer maximum performance on windows. I can overclock with offset without any issue. I'm wondering if the bios being buggy is maybe hindering my oc potential? 

[Master Disaster]

Did you try reducing RAM frequency as you overclocked the CPU? Leave the RAM @2133 and try going over 4.8, see if that helps.

[Draydince]

I haven't tried that yet, I was really hoping on getting the full 3200 as I've read most people are walling out at 29 with this board and RAM combo, so I was relieved that I actually got my full 32. Assuming I was able to achieve a 4ghz overclock, do you think there would be more performance in 3.8ghz with 3200 RAM or 4ghz with slower ram? A lot of people are raving about how imperative it is for Ryzen to run as high speed ram as possible, so I just took it to heart.

[DrMikeNZ]

10 minutes ago, Draydince said:

I haven't tried that yet, I was really hoping on getting the full 3200 as I've read most people are walling out at 29 with this board and RAM combo, so I was relieved that I actually got my full 32. Assuming I was able to achieve a 4ghz overclock, do you think there would be more performance in 3.8ghz with 3200 RAM or 4ghz with slower ram? A lot of people are raving about how imperative it is for Ryzen to run as high speed ram as possible, so I just took it to heart.

It really depends on your workload, in all of the applications I run on my R7 1700, RAM has made no difference. I get the same performance with the RAM at stock JEDEC 2133CL15, or overclocked to 3333CL14. However, if there is a lot of cross core communication with the workload, for example a physic engine computation in an un-optimised game, then the infinity fabric can cause bottlenecks which the RAM clock increase can alleviate.

I would just stick with 3.8GHz. If your cooler can handle it and you are comfortable then you could increase you cpu voltage to push it a little further, although with Ryzen once you hit the wall you typically need a significant power increase for an insignificant performance boost.

[MrBOT]

With 1700xc I can get a stable O.C. of 3.9ghz with 2666 MHz ram. Or I can go 3200 MHz with a stock Cpu clock. I can go 3.9 and 3200 but it will not Cinebench.  But everything runs fine.Before the last Asus bios update I could not get my ram above 2600Mhz. So its getting better.  On a side note I clocked my ram to 3666 Mhz  and I did notice a huge improvement in game load times.    I always use 1.375 volts for 3.8, but I have used offset of 0.018  for 3.8 and 0.025 for 3.9.

[Draydince]

I can get "gaming stable" 3.9 at 1.375 volts but it crashes within minutes of stress testing. Oddly I can complete Cinebench with those settings, but like I said not actual stress testing. I'll have to see if I can get higher if I downclock my RAM.

[ShinchanNL]

On my ryzen 1700 i can get a stable OC of 3.9 when having my memory at 2133. When I run my memory at its rated speed (3200cl14) I can't even run cinebench . 

 

I now run it at 3.8 on 1.3750 volts with the memory on 3200. 

 

Last weekend we managed to OC my mates R5 1500x to 3.9 at 1.3750 volts but he's got a 2133mhz kit installed. Also we both are on AIO coolers. So temps are good. 

 

I recently switched to a kraken x62 cooler to have more headroom in temps but haven't tried pushing my R7 1700 beyond 1.3750 volts yet.

 

[Draydince]

Huh. Yeah, no go on clocking past 3.8 even with lowering my RAM. In fact, I've started to notice some boot issues. Sometimes the system just hangs, no bios  and I have to manually power down. Even with stock settings. I'm beginning to think that beyond getting a dud overclocker, I may have just gotten a dud chip in general. I highly doubt I fried anything, the absolute "maximum" that I tried setting anything to was 1.41v with 3.9ghz, and I quickly gave up on that as I didn't want to push anymore voltage. As far as my daily use, it's only been sitting at 3.8ghz with 1.31v. Or with how buggy my bios has been, maybe its my board itself that's the dud. Either way this is kind of bumming. 

[ShinchanNL]

46 minutes ago, Draydince said:

Huh. Yeah, no go on clocking past 3.8 even with lowering my RAM. In fact, I've started to notice some boot issues. Sometimes the system just hangs, no bios  and I have to manually power down. Even with stock settings. I'm beginning to think that beyond getting a dud overclocker, I may have just gotten a dud chip in general. I highly doubt I fried anything, the absolute "maximum" that I tried setting anything to was 1.41v with 3.9ghz, and I quickly gave up on that as I didn't want to push anymore voltage. As far as my daily use, it's only been sitting at 3.8ghz with 1.31v. Or with how buggy my bios has been, maybe its my board itself that's the dud. Either way this is kind of bumming. 

It indeed can be a bummer. After my recent bios update I couldn't overclock at all. As soon as I dialed in a manual vcore my multiplier got stuck solid on 15.5 x . I'm on a gigabyte board and luckily gigabyte support provided me a beta bios that fixed it. The platform is still pretty new and not ironed out yet. 

[Draydince]

23 hours ago, ShinchanNL said:

It indeed can be a bummer. After my recent bios update I couldn't overclock at all. As soon as I dialed in a manual vcore my multiplier got stuck solid on 15.5 x . I'm on a gigabyte board and luckily gigabyte support provided me a beta bios that fixed it. The platform is still pretty new and not ironed out yet. 

Ah man, the same thing happens to me on my Taichi! I can kind of overclock with offset mode, but when I set a manual vcore it auto clocks to 1.5ghz no matter what speed or voltage it's set at. 

[Jumper118]

Try 3.85 or 3.875ghz you have to go up a full 100mhz. 

[ShinchanNL]

56 minutes ago, Draydince said:

Ah man, the same thing happens to me on my Taichi! I can kind of overclock with offset mode, but when I set a manual vcore it auto clocks to 1.5ghz no matter what speed or voltage it's set at. 

Yeah sounds exactly like what I was experiencing. Luckily gigabyte support helped me out by providing the beta bios.