Ryzen 5000 Series Voltages

[ngaugler]

Like many other consumers, I am new to AMD. Their previous CPU and chipset just did not interest me and I stuck with what I knew. Now that I am running an AMD, I am trying to determine safe voltages and configurations for squeezing a reasonable amount of overclocked performance out of my Ryzen 5000 series CPU. I am hoping the community can help steer myself, and probably others, in the right direction. I only have the 5900x, so the majority of my discussions will be centered around that processor. For my deployment, I disabled PBO and any other BIOS overclocks on the CPU and started with stock settings for CPU and XMP for the RAM. My motherboard is an Asrock X570 Taichi. I have an EVGA CLC 280mm AIO and a 1000W EVGA G3 PSU. All of these components should be acceptable for basic overclocking.


As I have stated, I do not have previous experience, but reading many different reviews and various posts and discussions, from what I gather the new Ryzen 5000 series has different voltage limits than the previous generations. Here's AMDs official word on voltages for the Ryzen 5000 series:



My experience and monitoring has shown that the 5900x falls in line with this slide. Under regular desktop use, the voltage range is 1.10v to 1.50v and cores fluctuate between 300Mhz and 4.95Ghz. When running Cinebench R23 across all 24 threads it the voltage range is 1.10v to 1.40v and the cores fluctuate between 4249Hz and 4299Hz. When I game, the voltage range is 1.40v to 1.50v, cores are mostly locked at 4649Hz, but sporadically under clock down into the 3Ghz range.

So this leads me to the question, what is the safe voltage for the chip? Now I think in the typical overclock when you lock voltage and configure BIOS for 24x7 use, I think the answer is 1.35v. If someone is going to be stressing the system out and wants their chip to last, I think maybe you drop it down to 1.30v? For gaming, however, this is where things get tricky. Based on what the process does with all overclocking disabled, it sounds like 1.45 or even 1.50v would be acceptable.

MSI held a webcast (WCCFTECH's summary of the webcast) during which they stated their recommendations for overclocking voltages:

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X - 1.30V (1.26V Stress / 24.56A / 294.72 Watts
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - 1.35V (1.30V Stress) / 18.02A / 216.24 Watts
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X - 1.40V (1.35V Stress) / 11.26A / 135.12 Watts
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X - 1.45V (1.40V Stress) / 8.460A / 101.52 Watts

This appears to backup the information coming from AMD and the real life use I have experienced.


I think the answer is pretty straight forward for typical overclocking. Does anyone have any thoughts or see any issues with any of my assessments?


For my personal goal, I want the best of both worlds.. 4.95Ghz for productivity use and the most I can get when gaming. I intend to leverage the Ryzen Master software to enable an overclock while I game, and to disable it for typical use. Will 1.45v be safe for gaming only? It seems like it should since the chip is doing it on it's own. When I hard set the voltage to 1.45v in Ryzen Master I am able to increase the cores past default boost of 4.65Ghz while gaming. Does anyone think this is a bad idea?

 

[Woomack]

You shouldn't care about max safe voltage because I'm almost sure you can't run it on your cooling and manual OC has no point on these CPUs. Try to disable power limits and temp limits but keep max safe temp at 95C. At ~1.4V it will probably hit the limit and throttle down to something like ~3GHz or shut down. This is about max safe voltage. 5900X has 142W or something, +40W or something SOC wattage. I don't remember if that was combined or not. Anyway, the CPU will try to keep these values under load. Run AVX2 benchmark and the CPU clock will go down to ~4.0-4.2GHz at ~1.05-1.15V. Run the same in non-AVX test and it will keep ~4.6GHz at ~1.35V. Both settings give about the same wattage.

At auto, the CPU runs between ~1.05-1.50V. There is no info what is safe for Ryzen 5000 as it supposed to run at auto settings. However, Ryzen 3000 users were reporting degradation or the CPU damage at 1.45V+ during longer work. Some reported problems at 1.40V. Maximum safe was ~1.35-1.37V for 24/7 work at manual settings so I assume it's also safe for 5000 series. There are always exceptions.

You can use hwinfo64 to read the wattage, temps and other things.

5900X supposed to boost up to 4.8GHz. My chip goes up to 4.9GHz+ on single cores. When I set enchanced core boost in ASUS BIOS then I can see up to 5.1GHz on 2 cores. However, I can't stabilize all 12 cores at more than 4.8GHz. At least on my CPU, I see no point in OC as results are pretty much the same at auto and manual settings.

 

[ngaugler]

My setup includes 3 monitors. I have Ryzen Master, HWMonitor, HWInfo, and GPU-Z running on the side monitors. With absolutely no overclocking configured on the CPU and stock / Auto configured in the BIOS the voltage runs between 1.4v and 1.4375v with some fluctuations up to 1.45v. The overall temperature never goes above 80C. This is not a stress test on all 24 threads. The processor is roughly 40-60% utilized.

 

[Woomack]

I was testing coolers recently and even though the CPU has a max temp of 90°C then it was always between 80-85°C under full load on small and large coolers. I was testing new Noctua NH-D9S and NH-D15S but also 360 AIO as a comparison. The main difference is how often the voltage drops and how much it drops but also at how high frequency, run all cores.
Voltages can be different depends on the used motherboard and set additional options. When you change from auto to manual mode then some power saving options will be disabled.
It's always like lower load = higher voltages unless you set it otherwise manually.

 

[ngaugler]

I think that is the key, how often the voltage drops. On the hardware monitoring tab, the Ryzen Master software shows Average Core Voltage and Maximum Voltage but it does not show Minimum Voltage. The average voltage is always right around 1.43v while gaming over a 1 second sample. It is very plausible that it is bouncing up and down in ms bursts and that is not reflected in the monitoring.


I do have another question. With the Intel processors, I could adjust the performance plan to set the minimum cpu state to 100%. This caused the cores to remain at the maximum burst and not fluctuate. I also utilize this on Intel Xeon servers with the Linux scheduler for work. We've noticed that our software latency dramatically spikes when the core Ghz are bouncing all over the place and locking the cores at 100% boost ensures our software performs with the lowest latency. I have attempted to set the minimum CPU state in Windows with the AMD to 100% but it does not appear to have any effect. I did download and install the AMD chipsets, so that should not be the issue. Do you have any thoughts on how to request the cores stay at full boost?

 

[Woomack]

Simply switch to manual mode or set the CPU ratio manually (depends on BIOS). It will disable some power saving options and will run the CPU always at the same clock. The only problem which you notice is that each core has its own maximum clock so if at auto you see all cores boosting to ~4.8-4.9GHz, then you can't count it will run manually at 4.8GHz on all cores. Then you can play with additional options to set the max clock to each CCD/CCX like one 4.6GHz and others at 4.7GHz or something like that. This will take some time to adjust all of them. Ryzen Master is usually suggesting the strongest cores so once you test it in windows, then can set it all in BIOS.
You may find a similar or even lower performance at manual settings compared to an auto. Depends on some variables it's better or worse so it's not a rule that manual OC is always better.
When you set cores manually then also unlock PPD limits or it will throttle or shut down.