We overclock the Ryzen 9 9950X3D up to 5900 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard and Enermax AIO cooling.

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 I. That will make the memory run at our EXPO-rated frequency of DDR5-8000 and timings. EXPO I will load only the primary timings and have the motherboard tune the secondary timings.

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 eight cores are active is 1.360V, up 10 mV from the default limit of 1.35V.

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 5550 MHz to 5750 MHz and the Fmax of the eight Zen 5 CPU cores in CCD1 from 5750 MHz to 5950 MHz.

Enter the Curve Shaper submenu. Here’s where the real magic happens as Curve Shaper allows us to finetune multiple regions the V/F curve. 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.

Curve Shaper introduces five tunable regions ranging from Min to Max frequency. In our overclock, we ignore the Min frequency, apply a maximum undervolt to Low and Medium frequencies, then finetune the High and Max frequency undervolt to ensure stability.

Note that the Curve Shaper settings are highly CPU-specific, so you should find the best values for your CPU rather than copying mine.

• For Low, Med, High, and Max Frequency, set Low, Med, and High Temperature to Enable
• For Low and Med Frequency, set Sign to Negative and Magnitude to 30
• For High Frequency, set Sign to Negative and Magnitude to 25
• For Max Frequency, set Sign to Negative and Magnitude to 10

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Ryzen 9 9950X3D 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.

When running the OCCT CPU SSE Stability Test, the average CPU core effective clock is 5393 MHz with 1.206 volts. The average CPU temperature is 89.2 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 166.5 watts.

And that’s it. I thank you for reading and the Patreons and YouTube members for the support. See you next tim