Overclocking… or Burning Down the House
Let me start this off by saying that overclocking Threadripper needs to be approached like holding a loaded gun. You have to prepare, check that all the safeties are in place, pull the trigger and brace for the recoil. It isn’t for the faint of heart, nor should you overlook any part of the process. Buy the best cooler you can afford, always log temperatures since they can run away into red-alert meltdown mode in a heartbeat and make sure your power supply is up to the job.
My story of overclocking these processors is one of both caution and success. I wasn’t expecting much, but the 1950X and 1920X actually delivered some respectable results and I’m sure things could have gone further had I switched out my cooler earlier. In a few words, without increasing fan speeds to max, the Corsair Hydro H90 simply wasn’t up to the job of keeping either CPU cool enough for stability over 3.9GHz on all cores. Going above 3.9GHz required more voltage which in turn simply overwhelmed Corsair’s otherwise excellent cooler. I swear that I smelled plastic melting somewhere as the 1950X hit 91°C within 10 minutes, threw up its arms and started throttling. The little brother 1920X didn’t behave any better as it took about 15 minutes to reach the critical temperatures and also start throttling. By that point, the heat coming off of the H90 could have warmed an entire Siberian village in the dead of winter.
Luckily, AMD had sent a triple-bay 360mm Thermaltake liquid cooler (now I know why…). Installing that unit greatly improved temperatures for both processors, with the 1950X finally leveling off at 4GHz while the mighty 1920X kept going all the way to 4.14GHz. The problem with both ended up being the not insignificant amount of voltage needed to reach those frequencies. Supposedly there’s a new BIOS revision in the pipeline that will lower voltage thresholds for overclocking and I’m already anxious to try that.
Another thing you will need to watch out for is power consumption. Due to the aforementioned voltage increases, the 1950X ended up sucking down 348W for the whole system, compared to the stock 260W. The same could be said of the 1920X which went from 242W to 333W. Like I said: be prepared with both cooling and power.
Overclocking… or Burning Down the House
Let me start this off by saying that overclocking Threadripper needs to be approached like holding a loaded gun. You have to prepare, check that all the safeties are in place, pull the trigger and brace for the recoil. It isn’t for the faint of heart, nor should you overlook any part of the process. Buy the best cooler you can afford, always log temperatures since they can run away into red-alert meltdown mode in a heartbeat and make sure your power supply is up to the job.
My story of overclocking these processors is one of both caution and success. I wasn’t expecting much, but the 1950X and 1920X actually delivered some respectable results and I’m sure things could have gone further had I switched out my cooler earlier. In a few words, without increasing fan speeds to max, the Corsair Hydro H90 simply wasn’t up to the job of keeping either CPU cool enough for stability over 3.9GHz on all cores. Going above 3.9GHz required more voltage which in turn simply overwhelmed Corsair’s otherwise excellent cooler. I swear that I smelled plastic melting somewhere as the 1950X hit 91°C within 10 minutes, threw up its arms and started throttling. The little brother 1920X didn’t behave any better as it took about 15 minutes to reach the critical temperatures and also start throttling. By that point, the heat coming off of the H90 could have warmed an entire Siberian village in the dead of winter.
Luckily, AMD had sent a triple-bay 360mm Thermaltake liquid cooler (now I know why…). Installing that unit greatly improved temperatures for both processors, with the 1950X finally leveling off at 4GHz while the mighty 1920X kept going all the way to 4.14GHz. The problem with both ended up being the not insignificant amount of voltage needed to reach those frequencies. Supposedly there’s a new BIOS revision in the pipeline that will lower voltage thresholds for overclocking and I’m already anxious to try that.
Another thing you will need to watch out for is power consumption. Due to the aforementioned voltage increases, the 1950X ended up sucking down 348W for the whole system, compared to the stock 260W. The same could be said of the 1920X which went from 242W to 333W. Like I said: be prepared with both cooling and power.


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