High idle frequency in W11 when only 1% is used on Ryzen 7900
High idle frequency in W11 when only 1% is used on Ryzen 7900
I recently set up W11 for the first time on my new 7900 using a Gigabyte B650M DS3H. Both W11 and AM5 are unfamiliar to me, but everything seems fine. I even managed to configure XMP RAM to 6000 from JEDEC 4800, despite having an AMD chipset and APU driver installed. No Gigabyte software was added. During idle mode (just 1% usage with no heavy processes), the CPU runs at 3.0–3.7 GHz, which is much higher than my previous i7-7700k that idled below 1 GHz. I’m curious if there’s a way to adjust settings to address this. The power plan is set to “balanced,” and both power saver and CPU min are at 0% with max at 100%. Resource monitor indicates all cores are idle, though a few show occasional spikes. This appears normal. I didn’t find any BIOS options for power management, so it might be an AMD driver issue or just typical behavior. The HW monitor shows elevated clock speeds across all cores, which makes me question the reliability of those power readings.
Ryzen Master offers strong performance tuning options at 600-700 MHz. Those monitoring tools may not be very helpful, but the PBO and Auto-Overclocking settings are manageable in BIOS. The Curve Optimizer works well, though it can take a while—should I just select all cores and start optimizing, then repeat for Auto Overclocking? I have a Peerless Assassin.
It isn't completely useless; the package power shows it's not operating at full capacity. A typical user would simply switch on PBO and stop using it, except perhaps for minor adjustments like curve optimization.
I meant displaying wrong values is worse than not displaying values. On the upside, this led me to discover the Ryzen Master. So it was useful somewhat. FWIW, HWInfo64 also shows way over 3 GHz. So there seems to be an issue with all those not reading 7000-series CPUs. I played with Auto Overclocking (and limited it to 150W) in a profile (not curve-optimized). Runs a over 5.1 GHz on all 12 cores and a it under 90°C Edit: in PBO it seems to be a bit higher speed with same power limit. i ended up just using PBO and limiting it to 125W. that still gives me a bit over 5GHz on all 12 cores and a bit over 75°C. Idling at under 400MHz now. This is such a great CPU and the tool is great too. I remember on a Pentium 1 (the original Pentium!) I had to set jumpers to from 133MHz to 166MHz (200MHz didn't work stable).
Did you have Ryzen Master and HWInfo64 open at the same time? I'm curious if its actually wrong or HWInfo is somehow triggering the speed boost each time it samples. As it doesn't sample very quickly it could easily be accurate but misleading. I remember the days of jumpers too, when you got curious and tried setting a higher speed than your CPU was designed. Then later trying to slightly overclock the ISA/PCI bus to get a bit more speed, but not all cards liking it or it breaking some games due to timing issues. The stutter-struggle of today is nothing compared to how hit and miss PC gaming used to be, though there is far less excuse for it now given the tools available.