We’re overclocking the Ryzen 9 5950X CPU up to 5117 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the EK-Quantum MSI MPG X570S Carbon EK X motherboard.

I’ll speed run you through the BIOS settings and provide some notes and tips along the way. Please note that this is for entertainment purposes only and most certainly not the whole picture. Please don’t outright copy these settings and apply to your system. If you want to learn how to overclock this system, please check out the longer SkatterBencher article.

Alright, let’s do this.

Ryzen 9 5950X Overclock Settings

When you’re entered the BIOS, Press F7 to switch to Advanced Mode.

Then go to the OC menu. Immediately enter the advanced CPU configuration menu.

Then enter the AMD Overclocking submenu. Here’s where we’ll do most of the grunt work by tuning Precision Boost Overdrive

Set Precision Boost Overdrive to Advanced and set PBO Limits to Manual.

Set PPT Limit [W] to 1000, TDC Limit [A] to 500, and EDC Limit [A] to 500. This increases the power, thermal, and current headroom of our motherboard VRM.

Set Precision Boost Overdrive Scalar to Manual and 10X. This tricks the PBO algorithm into thinking our CPU is much better than it actually is. So it will push for higher voltages.

Set Max CPU Boost Clock Override to 200MHz. This increases the frequency ceiling by 200 MHz over the programmed max 1T limit. On the 5950X that’s 5025MHz even though the listed max boost frequency is 4900MHz. Adding 200 MHz results in a ceiling of 5225 MHz.

Enter the Curve Optimizer submenu and set Curve Optimizer to Per Core.

Here’s where the real magic happens as curve optimizer allows us to adjust the V/f curve for each core by up to 30 steps of 3 to 5 mV. Setting a negative curve means the CPU will use less voltage for a given frequency. That in turn results in lower power, thermal, and current. This in turn gives more headroom for setting higher voltage. And that, well, that gives us higher frequencies.

I tested each core individually to find what’s the best Curve Optimizer setting.

• Set Core 0 to Core 15 Optimizer Sign to Negative
• Set Core 1 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 4
• Set Core 3 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 11
• Set Core 10, Core 13, and Core 14 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 20
• Set Core 15 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 10
• Set Curve Optimizer Magnitude for all remaining cores to 26

Leave the Curve Optimizer submenu and set LCLK DPM Enhanced PCIe Detection to Disabled. This helped me get a more stable system when increasing the reference clock frequency later on.

Leave the Advanced CPU configuration submenu

Set FCH Base Clock (MHz) to 101.3125. This will increase our Precision Boost algorithm frequencies by about 1.3%. So if the algorithm sets 5000 MHz, the actual frequency will be 5066 MHz. Or, in our case, the maximum boost frequency ceiling goes up from 5225 MHz to 5294 MHz

Set A-XMP to Profile1. This will make the memory run at DDR4-4266 but also runs infinity fabric in asynchronous mode. However, since we increased the reference clock to 101.3125, our memory will run at DDR4-4322.

Set Memory Try It ! to DDR4-4400 18-22-22-22-42 FCLK-1800MHz. This optimizes our memory even further by increasing the frequency to DDR4-4458 (4400 adjusted by our reference clock of 101.3125) and adjusting the primary memory timings from 19-19-19-39 to 18-22-22-22-42.

Enter the DigitALL Power submenu. Set CPU Loadline Calibration Control to Mode 3, just to make sure we get a better grip on the actual voltage when using Curve Optimizer.

Leave the DigitALL Power submenu.

Set CPU Core Voltage to Offset Mode, then set CPU Offset Mode Mark to + and CPU Offset Voltage to 0.0625V. This gives another 62.5mV offset over the Precision Boost voltage. So if Precision Boost says 1.4 volt we’ll get 1.465 volt.

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Ryzen 9 5950X Overclock Performance Result

To make sure everything is working as intended we re-run some benchmarks and check the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better; and all are higher.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX enabled, the average effective CPU clock is 3901 MHz with 1.197 volts. The average CPU temperature is 90 degrees Celsius and the average VRM temperature is 70 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 257 watts.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX disabled, the average effective CPU clock is 4053 MHz with 1.242 volts. The average CPU temperature is 86 degrees Celsius and the average VRM temperature is 66 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 248 watts.

Before we wrap up this video, let’s have a closer look at the supercharged PBO results as there’s a couple of things I want to highlight.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 5117 MHz for Core 2. This is lower than our adjusted frequency ceiling of 5225 MHz. This tells us that our CPU may not be the best overclocker out there. When using the Corecycler application to check the effective clock frequency in a single threaded workload we find that the average effective clock in single threaded application across all cores is 4910 MHz.

And that’s it, thanks for reading and see you next time!