We’re overclocking the Ryzen Threadripper 7960X CPU up to 5715 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the GIGABYTE TRX50 Aero D motherboard and EK-Quantum custom loop water 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 article.

All right, let’s do this.

5 Minute Speedrun

When you’ve entered the BIOS, stay in Easy Mode.

Set XMP/EXPO Profile to EXPO 1. That makes the memory run at our EXPO-rated frequency of DDR5-6400 and timings.

Enable XMP/EXPO High Bandwidth Support and Low Latency Support. These parameters further optimize the system memory performance.

Switch to Advanced Mode.

Set System Memory Multiplier to 66.00. This will increase the system memory to DDR5-6600 while retaining the EXPO memory timings and voltages.

Set Infinity Fabric Frequency and Dividers to 2200 MHz. This increases the performance of the infinity fabric, which connects the various chiplets on our chip package.

Set UCLK DIV1 Mode to UCLK=MEMCLK. This forces the memory controller to operate at the same frequency as the system memory. Since we’re running DDR5-6600, the memory controller frequency will be 3300 MHz.

Switch to the Settings 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 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. Note that the standard Fmax for CCD0 is 5650 MHz and only 5350 MHz for CCDs 1 to 3.

Set Max CPU Boost Clock Override(+) to 200. This increases each CCD’s Fmax by 200 MHz. The new Fmax for this CPU is 5850 MHz for CCD0 and 5550 MHz for CCDs 1 to 3. This also changes the C-State Boost limit frequency from 4800 MHz to 5 GHz when 8 or more cores are active.

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 Threadripper 7000, we can set the Curve Optimizer for the whole CPU, per CCD, and per core.

Set Curve Optimizer to Per Core

Set Core 0 to Core 23 Curve Optimizer Sign to Negative. 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.

I set the Curve Optimizer Magnitude for each core according to my test result.

• Set Core 0 to 3 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 5
• Set Core 4 and 5 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 10
• Set Core 6 to 23 Curve Optimizer Magnitude to 50

Then save and exit the BIOS.

Ryzen Threadripper 7980X Overclock Performance Improvement

We re-ran some benchmarks to ensure everything works as intended and checked the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better, and all are higher. The Geomean performance improvement is +6.57%, and we get a maximum improvement of +22.34% in Y-Cruncher.

The highest Core Clock reported in the operating system is 5715 MHz.

When running the OCCT CPU SSE Stability Test, the average CPU core effective clock is 5218 MHz with 1.264 volts. The average CPU temperature is 81.8 degrees Celsius. The average CPU package power is 376.5 watts.

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