Auto & Manual Overclocking Results
Auto & Manual Overclocking Results
The ASRock Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming that we recently reviewed had zero forms of automatic overclocking functionality, neither in the UEFI BIOS nor via a utility. Despite this, we did not judge this omission too harshly due to the fact that with ThreadRipper we are dealing with processors with a default TDP of up to 180W, which is already pretty difficult to cool without a top-notch cooling solution. And furthermore, there just isn't a huge amount of additional performance to be extracted, especially since AMD's SenseMI technology and eXtended Frequency Range (XFR) feature does such a terrific job of maximizing frequency and boosting overall performance past - at least in some workloads - what a static Auto OC preset could hope to achieve. Nevertheless, ASUS clearly has a different opinion than we do since the PRIME X399-A is packed with three different automatic overclocking methods. We will be demonstrating what each of them was able to do with a twelve-core 1920X.
For those who prefer to go hands-on, this motherboard makes manual overclocking easy. Simply set the CPU voltage to 1.30-1.35V and start increasing the CPU multiplier (and CPU frequency if you want to get ultra-precise) until it crashes in your preferred stress test, then back off a little bit. Although you cannot manually overclock the SOC/Fabric frequency, it is automatically increased when you set a higher memory speed. Specifically, the Fabric runs at half the memory speed, so DDR4-3200 means a 1600Mhz Fabric frequency. Since manual memory overclocking is still a little iffy on both of AMD's new platforms, we recommend sticking to whatever kits have been validated for your particular motherboard and just working up from whatever settings the XMP profile sets. Having said that, if you've done your research and picked a memory with a Samsung B-die ICs, this motherboard has a bunch of awesome memory profiles that range from DDR4-3200 with ultra-tight timings to DDR4-3600 with more reasonable timings. It's a fantastic addition.
Auto Overclocking
Like many previous ASUS motherboards, the PRIME X399-A features three types of automatic overclocking. There is the TPU feature and the Overclocking Presets sub-menu that you can find in the UEFI BIOS, and the 5-Way Optimization feature that is located in the Ai Suite III utility. Both of the BIOS-based options rely on presets and they are very quick since all you need to do is select your preferred option and exit BIOS. We are going to focus on these two BIOS-based approaches first.
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The TPU feature only offers two choices,
TPU I or TPU II. Usually, TPU I applies a overclocking preset that is designed for those with air cooling, while TPU II is a more aggressive option for those with liquid cooling or very high-end air cooling. However, given how little headroom ThreadRipper processors have there's very little actual different between both presets. In practice, TPU I overclocked our 1920X to 3.8GHz at 1.243V, while the The TPU II option upped the core clock to 3.9GHz at 1.330V. Both options left the memory speed untouched. Although this BIOS-based automatic overclocking option is very fast, it is designed to be very safe so it produces slightly less impressive results than what is truly possible.
With that in mind, ASUS also offers the
4G OC Profile preset. This preset promises a 4.0GHz overclock, which isn't outlandish at all for a ThreadRipper processor. However, it's the CPU core voltage that is going to be interesting, so let's see if it worked:
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As expected, this preset was applied without any fanfare. The CPU core voltage fluctuated between 1.352V and 1.373V. This is getting a little high, but with a high-end air or liquid cooling solution - which you should have if you're spending well over a thousand dollars on this HEDT platform - it is easily manageable. Much like the TPU presets, the memory speed is left untouched and thus runs at a lowly DDR4-2133. The side effect of this is that Fabric/SOC frequency is limited to a meager 1066Mhz, so you're really not maximizing core-to-core bandwidth as well as memory bandwidth. As you will see in our benchmarking results, despite the higher all-core frequency, this configuration is often a fair bit slower than when running at the stock CPU frequency but with a higher speed.
With the two 'dumb' preset methods tested, let's see what smart 5-Way Optimization feature is capable of:
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As mentioned above, within the Ai Suite III utility there is the 5-Way Optimization automatic overclocking feature. This is an intelligent approach to automatic overclocking because it does not rely on presets. Instead, it slowly increases your processor's clock speed and voltage, tests for stability, monitors fan speeds and temperatures, and repeats until it has found
the sweet spot.
Since we are always aggressive when it comes to overclocking, we selected the
TPU II and Extreme Tuning options. After a few minutes As you can see above, the results are pretty much the same as when we used the previously mentioned 4Ghz OC Preset. The only difference is that the CPU multiplier was set to 39.75X instead of 40.00X and there's a tiny bump up in the bus speed. That miniscule bus speed increase does provide a slight memory speed and Fabric/SOC overclock as well. The CPU core voltage bounced between 1.373V and 1.395V pretty regularly, independent of the type of workload. Despite this occasional bump in core voltage, there wasn't any appreciable increase in temperatures when compared to the 4GHz OC Preset.
Manual Overclocking
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As you can see, we were able to push our twelve-core 1920X processor all the way up to 4.15GHz at a very reasonable 1.30-1.31V. This is the all-core frequency too, so quite a bit better than the default all-core frequency of 3.70Ghz, and pretty darn close to the XFR frequency of 4.2GHz (which is limited to 4 cores). We could have potentially hit a bit higher - even without any additional voltage - but temperatures really seemed to skyrocket at/past 4.2GHz. Either way, 4.15GHz is still very much at the upper-end of what these ThreadRipper processors are capable of using conventional cooling, in our case a Thermaltake Floe Riing 360 all-in-one liquid CPU cooler.
On a side note, since ASUS has allowed bus speed to natively float up to 100.60Mhz we needed to set the CPU multiplier to 41.25X in order to stay at or below 4150MHz. We usually - like on the
ASRock Fatal1ty X399 - set a 41.5X multiplier but on this motherboard that pushed the CPU frequency up to 4175MHz which is simply not stable on this processor at ~1.30V.
When it came to the memory we utilized our always trusty G.Skill Trident Z F4-3200C14Q-32GTZSW (4x8GB - Samsung B-die ICs) memory kit, which features a DDR4-3200 XMP profile with 14-14-14 timings. This motherboard had no issues applying the XMP profile's memory speed or timings, and it appropriately increased the SOC voltage from the 0.81V default (at DDR4-2133) to 1.11V and set the DRAM voltage to 1.35V. Using this as a starting point, we were able to push the memory speed to DDR4-3600 16-16-16 with only a slight increase in the SOC voltage to 1.13V. When pushing up to DDR4-3733 we had more stability on this motherboard than on the ASRock Fatal1ty X399, but ultimately still could no get it fully stable. Still not too shabby given that the PRIME X399-A is only validated for DDR4-3333.
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While we are on the topic of memory, just like with their numerous CPU automatic overclocking features, ASUS have also included a bunch of memory overclocking presets. While they are all tailored for Samsung B-die based kits, they are all really impressive presets, particularly the "Fast 3333Mhz" that has superb secondary timings and the bottom DDR4-3600 option is an easy way to reach that high number. Obviously stay away from the top profiles with the 1.8V and 1.9V voltage settings, since those are for extreme sub-zero overclockers.
Overall, this motherboard was a pleasure to work with and it makes overclocking easy enough so that just about anyone should be able extract from additional headroom from their CPU and/or memory kit. The real question is whether these automatic overclock actually add extra performance when compared to just enabling XMP on a sufficiently fast memory kit.
