advice on overclocking ryzen

[xdeathshot20]

so i picked up a 2600x today and i plan on doing some overclocking with it.  im running a nzxt x61 all in one for cooling so i got that part covered.  the mobo is a asus x470 prime.  what is a safe voltage to be at when overclocking?  also anything else that i should know about as this will be my first tie overclocking

[Jurrunio]

Absolute max is 1.42V, but do more tests between 1.35 to 1.4V because the heat output of Zen+ rises significantly faster compared to Zen as voltage goes up.

[pstarlord]

It's pretty easy, it's a bit time consuming, but I think its fun. 

 

First thing, download Cinebench.  Get a baseline from that by running the CPU test.  (write that number down)

 

In your BIOS increase the Cock Speed of the CPU in very small increments. Start with 50mhz or so. (make sure to write down your settings as well)  Each time you do, save changes, and run Cinebench again.  Keeping a tally of the performance increase.  Continue doing this until your CPU crashes mid test.  (it's okay, it won't hurt anything) Just hard reset your system if gets completely stuck.

 

Often times your BIOS may reset your overclock at this point, but sine you wrote down your previous settings you can put the clock speed back to where it was unstable.  After you find an unstable clock speed, then bump the voltage up in small steps, like .025 at a time.  Keep bumping it up like this until the clock speed that crashed gets through cinebench CPU test without crashing. 

 

Continue bumping the clock speed up until it crashes, then bump voltage up to stabilize that speed.  Repeat that process until you can't stabilize it any more.  The max voltage you'll want to use does vary but often times your mobo will give you some sort of indication that you shouldn't go farther.  For instance on my mobo, the voltage settings are grayed out when I've a certain point, while it'll technically let me push it past that point, it's not advisable.  1.42 is a pretty common max point.  Like @Jurrunio said, you don't want to live at that max voltage.

 

After you've got it set as high as you can get it to be stable on Cinebench, you can find some other CPU stress tests just to make sure it's functionally stable.  If you ever happen to encounter your CPU just locking up, you can back your clock speed off a little bit from maximum.  

[schwellmo92]

It's honestly not worth overclocking, unless you're hitting 100% across all cores you wont notice any performance difference and then even on 100% across all cores you're looking at 5-6% uplift for an overclock (for more heat, power consumption, instability, etc).