We’re overclocking the Ryzen 9 9950X up to 5900 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard and water cooling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETAOCjRLUt0

I’ll speedrun 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 guide.

All right, let’s do this.

5 Minute Speedrun

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

Set Ai Overclock Tuner to EXPO II. That makes the memory run at our EXPO-rated frequency of DDR5-6400 and associated primary memory timings and voltage.

Switch to the Advanced menu.

Enter the AMD Overclocking submenu. This will provide us with all the advanced AMD CPU overclocking tools.

Click Accept

Enter the Precision Boost Overdrive submenu. Here, we can use the AMD Precision Boost Overdrive 2 toolkit to increase the power, current, and frequency headroom of the Precision Boost 2 boost algorithm.

Set Precision Boost Overdrive to Advanced

Set PBO Limits to Motherboard. 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:

Set Precision Boost Overdrive Scalar Ctrl to Manual. That enables us to override the warranted silicon stress level, or FIT, which is one of the Precision Boost limiters governing the maximum allowed operating voltage.

Set Precision Boost Overdrive Scalar to 10X. This increases the FIT to ten times the factory-fused value. Now, the maximum voltage when all sixteen cores are active is 1.370V, up 25 mV from the default limit of 1.345V.

Set CPU Boost Clock Override to Enabled (Positive). That unlocks the ability to increase the CPU’s programmed Fmax, or maximum frequency, up to 200 MHz in steps of 25 MHz. For dual-CCD Ryzen 9000 CPUs it’s crucial to know that each CCD has its own Fmax and the override applies to both CCDs independently.

Set Max CPU Boost Clock Override(+) to 200. This increases the Fmax of the eight Zen 5 CPU cores in CCD0 from 5750 MHz to 5950 MHz and the Fmax of the eight Zen 5 CPU cores in CCD1 from 5450 MHz to 5650 MHz.

Enter the Curve Optimizer submenu. Here’s where the real magic happens as curve optimizer allows us to finetune the V/f curve for each core in a positive or negative direction. Each step represents around 5mV. On Ryzen 9000 processors we can set the Curve Optimizer for all cores, per CCD, or per core.

Set Curve Optimizer to Per CCD. This the best approach for dual-CCD Ryzen 9000 CPUs because each CCD has its own VFT curve and may have very different undervolting capabilities. We will set a negative curve optimizer for both CCDs. 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 copy mine.

• Set CCD0 Curve Optimizer Sign to Negative.
• Set CCD0 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 15.
• Set CCD1 Curve Optimizer Sign to Negative.
• Set CCD1 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 10.

Leave the Curve Optimizer submenu.

Leave the Precision Boost Overdrive submenu

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Ryzen 9 9950X Overclock Performance Improvement

We re-run some benchmarks to ensure everything works as intended and check the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better, and all are higher. The Geomean performance improvement is +5.15%, and we get a maximum improvement of +16.54% in PyPrime.

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

When running the OCCT CPU SSE Stability Test, the average CPU core effective clock is 5137 MHz with 1.117 volts. The average CPU temperature is 95.1 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 242.1 watts.

And that’s it. I thank you for watching and the Patreons for the support. See you next time!