Is a partial overclock feasible?
Is a partial overclock feasible?
Hi everyone, I'm seeking advice from more experienced overclockers. I have a Ryzen 1700 and I'm wondering if it's possible to only overclock the 4 cores while keeping the other 4 at base or lower speeds. My reason is for gaming, and I don't want all cores running at high speeds.
It might be possible with careful adjustments to the BIOS settings for each core individually, but it’s not really necessary. You’ll get better results by increasing the factory boost speeds across all cores instead of limiting half of them and overclocking the rest. The only real benefit would come from certain games that aren’t well-optimized for multiple threads, where a small amount of extra overclocking might still make a difference. In most cases, the existing optimizations already provide enough performance without additional tweaks.
Certainly it COULD be done, by manually adjusting the core clocks in the BIOS on a per core basis, but honestly it's pointless to do so. You'll see better gains with moderate all core factory boost speeds on ALL cores, than you will by locking half your cores at their stock speeds and overclocking the remainder of cores. The only way you'd see any gains from a similar configuration would be on specific titles that do not have good multicore optimization, in which case the very little amount of overclocking headroom on most Ryzen systems probably isn't going to be enough beyond what they boost to automatically anyhow to be worth doing, and the fact is that most current games are either very much geared for multithreaded performance or are headed that way in the very near future.
There's a good reason that both Intel and AMD are adding increasing numbers of cores and hyperthreads and intentionally taking yourself out of that beneficial configuration makes no practical sense these days. It's not like the old days when we used to get a highly binned i7, turn off the hyperthreading and crank up the clock speed on the four physical cores as high as they could remain stable and thermally compliant at.
If you can't get a stable overclock on all cores, that is higher than the natural all core boost speed, then you either have a motherboard without a good VRM configuration, a poorly binned CPU sample or a lack of adequate cooling, or some combination of all three. Your generation of Ryzen is simply not particularly friendly towards overclocking in general because even professional overclockers with top shelf supporting hardware have rarely been able to achieve much beyond the stock boost that is stable enough to run as a daily driver.