We’re overclocking the Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU up to 5900 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme motherboard and EK-Quantum custom loop water cooling.

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 not the whole picture. Please don’t outright copy these settings and apply them 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.

5 Minute Speedrun

When you’ve entered the BIOS, enter the Extreme Tweaker menu.

Set Ai Overclock Tuner to EXPO I. That will make the memory run at our EXPO-rated frequency of DDR5-6400 and timings. EXPO I will load only the primary timings and have the motherboard tune the secondary timings. EXPO II will load the entire profile without motherboard adjustments.

Set Memory Frequency to DDR5-6000. While our memory kit is rated at DDR5-6400, unfortunately, our CPU isn’t able to run that frequency. By enabling EXPO, we still benefit from the improved memory timings.

Enter the Precision Boost Overdrive submenu. Here is where we will do most of the performance tuning as PBO provides us with tools to increase the power, current, and frequency headroom of the Precision Boost 2 boost algorithm.

Set Precision Boost Overdrive to Enabled. This adjusts the PBO platform parameters PPT, TDC, and EDC according to the motherboard auto-rules. On this motherboard, we find that the following values have changed:

Increasing the platform boost parameters typically have the most significant effect with multi-threaded processors. For Ryzen 7000, however, AMD’s default platform parameters are relatively unconstraining. So even with the 16-core 7950X, we don’t hit the platform limits at stock values. Ultimately, we don’t expect much performance improvement from enabling PBO.

Note that the most constraining limits, the VID Limit, cannot be changed with the Precision Boost Overdrive 2 toolkit. So we cannot run the 3D V-Cache CCD at a voltage higher than 1.2V.

Set CPU Boost Clock Override to Enabled (Positive).

Set Max CPU Boost Clock Override to 150. This increases the CPU’s frequency ceiling by 150 MHz over the programmed max 1T limit. On this Ryzen 9 7950X3D, that’s 5750 MHz. Increasing this by 150 MHz results in a ceiling of 5900 MHz. Note that the 3D V-Cache CCD has a lower Fmax of 5250 MHz and that the CPU Boost Clock Override does not affect this CCD. So the Fmax for CCD0 remains at 5250 MHz while the new Fmax for CCD1 is 5900 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 finetune the V/f curve for each core in a or negative direction. Each step represents around 5mV.

Setting a negative offset means the CPU will use less voltage for a given frequency and boost to a higher frequency at a specific voltage. Setting a positive offset means the CPU will use more voltage for a given frequency and boost to a lower frequency at a particular voltage. It’s the former we need in our overclock. Note that the Curve Optimizer settings are highly CPU-specific so you should find the best values for your CPU rather than copying mine.

• For every core, set Curve Optimizer Sign to Negative
• For Cores 0, 5, 9, and 12, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 30
• For Cores 1, 3, 8, 10, and 11, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 20
• For Core 2, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 15
• For Cores 4, 14, and 15, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 35
• For Core 6, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 40
• For Cores 7 and 13, set Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 35

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Ryzen 9 7950X3D Overclock Performance Improvement

To ensure 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. We see a maximum performance increase of +10.64% in the AI Benchmark.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 5900 MHz.

When running Prime 95 Small FFTs with AVX disabled, the average CPU effective clock is 4732 MHz with 0.945 volts. The average CPU temperature is 82.5 degrees Celsius. The ambient and water temperature is 23.7 and 31.9 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 150.0 watts.

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