For the Tweak League, participants all received a Ryzen 7800X3D processor from AMD, a B650 Steel Legend motherboard from ASRock, all cooled by DeepCool’s LT720 WH.
Our tutorial to easily overclock this Ryzen 7800X3D
Without going into too much detail, for an X3D processor there are only 2 parameters we can play with: Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and Eclk. However, you’ll need a very high-end motherboard to play with the latter parameter, so we’ll concentrate on the PBO. Note that although this tutorial focuses on the Ryzen 7800X3D, it can also be used for other 7000X3Ds.
As its name suggests, the PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) controls the performance boosts of our processor cores. It modifies core frequency and voltage, while respecting the temperature limit set in the BIOS.
For all the following steps I’ll use the BIOS interface of the ASRock B650 Steel Legend, but the steps will be similar on other motherboards.
[nextpage title=”Easy Overclocking”]
Easy overclocking (5 minutes)
- When your PC starts up, you’ll need to enter the BIOS, usually by pressing the Del or F2 key.
- In the BIOS, look for the OC Tweaker tab
- The first option is Performance Preset
- Choose the option: PBO. Tjmax = 85°C and Curve Optimizer – 20mV , which should be stable with all Ryzen 7XXX X3Ds
- Quit the BIOS, taking care to save the settings.
To ensure stable overclocking, I recommend downloading OCCT or Cinebench R23 and running a 10-minute processor test.
[nextpage title=”Advanced Overclocking”]
Advanced overclocking (30-40 minutes)
Whereas the Easy Overclocking version doesn’t take into account the difference in performance between each core, the following method will seek to take advantage of each core to the maximum of its performance.
- When booting up your PC, you’ll need to enter the BIOS, usually by pressing the Del or F2 key.
- Navigate to Advanced > AMD Overclocking > Accept
- Modify the following parameters: Precision Boost Overdrive: Advanced – PBO Limits: Motherboard – CPU Boost Clock Override: Enabled (Positive) / 200 – Platform Thermal Throttle Ctrl: Manual / 85
- Now enter the Curve optimizer menu and select “Per Core”
- We’ll start by setting the values for each core to Negative -20
- We now have the same configuration as for easy overclocking. I recommend that you validate the stability of overclocking with a single run of Cinebench R23. This will also give us a score that we’ll be looking to improve.
- If validated, return to Curve Optimizer and we’ll go to -25 on all cores, then check stability. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to go to -30 on all cores.
- Once the maximum stable setting has been reached, we return to Curve Optimizer and this time play with 1 core at a time, adjusting it by -5, always checking the Cinebench R23 score increase and stability.
- When the stability limit is reached, we move on to the next core.
We’re looking here to optimize each core, which doesn’t all respond in the same way to overclocking, which is why we’ll often see different values.
If you really want to optimize, you can adjust from -1 to -1 to find the limits, but you’ll spend hours for a minimal performance gain.