News AMD's Ryzen 3000 Boost-Fixing BIOS Leaks out, We Test With Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X

[TJ Hooker]

Whatever was broken, was linked to the name of the account, and stored somewhere outside of what is initialized on an account deletion/creation.

If I had to guess I'd say it'd be something in the registry.

 

[CountMike]

Asus Prime x470 pro, R7 3700x, I have seen steady decline in boost (PBO set to max) with every BIOS version since 5007 I started with. From steady 4.375Ghz to now practically unattainable over 4.25GHz and only after reducing poling interval to 500mSec I could occasionally see 4.316GHz. ob one core. Only real improvement is in auto voltage settings and with it heat output.
AGESA 1003ABB didn't actually do anything to boost values nor did latest BIOS. Still have to adjust many things including voltages to keep everything in check or auto settings will make a mess out of it. I don't think average customer is going to or even be interested in fiddling with BIOS settings. MB manufacturers should really have to get off their buts and do something about it.

 

[RodroX]

...No one is saying the chips are "bad" however a user should not need to know how to tinker in the BIOS to reach advertised stock speeds. Yes there is a lot you can do to improve it as most motherboards stock settings tend to be meh, same with overclocking as most boards would err on the side of higher voltage when you can tweak it to be lower, but again advertised stock settings should be what the CPU can do when it is installed with all normal drivers in a stock setting.

Yes there will be variation, hence what we call the silicon lottery. Some may only reach the minimum stated speeds others may have the potential for more. Some may be able to run on lower voltages and lower temperatures at stock while others may do so higher etc.

RAM shouldn't have much to do with the top frequency of the CPU. Cooling, yes. Thats a huge part of it but as I have said before, if you include a stock cooler then the stated stock speeds should be obtainable by that cooling method not requiring after market...

I can agree with you in some points, and as long as you go and get a PC from a known Brand or a Boutique store, then it should work out of the box as the manufacture posted on thier website.

But when you buy all the parts and build it on your own then its your task to tweak and set everything to work properly.
You can't expect components from 5, 6 or more diferent brands to be assemble and work perfect out of the box. Yes that will be fantastic (sometimes it may even happend, in my case it did, I got a Ryzen 5 3600, Gigabyte mobo, Adata RAM, Kingston SSD, WD harddrive, and a Seasonic PSU and everything worked fine out of the box, and got the max frecuency on the first try), but its not the usual thing when building a PC, either be AMD or INTEL CPU.

About my experience with Ryzen 3xxx: I took my time, several days, searching in website, forums, media, etc. and finding out if all the parts I was buying were able to work togheter in harmony without issues, I wonder how many of the ones that are complaining did any research at all?

Once again Im not defending AMD, Im not a fan boy, I had Intel, AMD and even Cyrix CPUs in the past, Im a fan of technology in general and I been a technician for more than 20 years.

I do wonder, did everyone complaining about max boost frecunecy tested in a real world scenario, like playing a game for 1 hour, rendering a video, doing any heavy load real world task if they are loosing any real perfoemance whats so ever?

Anyways, I really hope, I do, that the buyers of the (atleast for me) really expensive models can get whats been advertised and what they payed for on the website or by some (not all) media. And if theres need to be a legal move agasint AMD so be it.

Cheers!

 

[jimmysmitty]

I can agree with you in some points, and as long as you go and get a PC from a known Brand or a Boutique store, then it should work out of the box as the manufacture posted on thier website.

But when you buy all the parts and build it on your own then its your task to tweak and set everything to work properly.
You can't expect components from 5, 6 or more diferent brands to be assemble and work perfect out of the box. Yes that will be fantastic (sometimes it may even happend, in my case it did, I got a Ryzen 5 3600, Gigabyte mobo, Adata RAM, Kingston SSD, WD harddrive, and a Seasonic PSU and everything worked fine out of the box, and got the max frecuency on the first try), but its not the usual thing when building a PC, either be AMD or INTEL CPU.

About my experience with Ryzen 3xxx: I took my time, several days, searching in website, forums, media, etc. and finding out if all the parts I was buying were able to work togheter in harmony without issues, I wonder how many of the ones that are complaining did any research at all?

Once again Im not defending AMD, Im not a fan boy, I had Intel, AMD and even Cyrix CPUs in the past, Im a fan of technology in general and I been a technician for more than 20 years.

I do wonder, did everyone complaining about max boost frecunecy tested in a real world scenario, like playing a game for 1 hour, rendering a video, doing any heavy load real world task if they are loosing any real perfoemance whats so ever?

Anyways, I really hope, I do, that the buyers of the (atleast for me) really expensive models can get whats been advertised and what they payed for on the website or by some (not all) media. And if theres need to be a legal move agasint AMD so be it.

Cheers!

Even when building the system it should. AMD targets enthusiasts in a lot of their marketing. Stock is stock and should work as specified out of the box. If this were about the lack of overclocking headroom I would say who cares as it sucks but this is about advertised speeds.

So far in every other system I have built, have not built a Ryzen system yet, I have gotten advertised speeds out of the box with no BIOS tweaking. When I did PC repair and custom builds for a company every single system that had good components, i.e. no bad RAM or board, worked at their stock settings and gave the stated processor speeds on stock cooling be it Intel or AMD Short of slight variances in the motherboard for the BCLK or the voltage the board set the CPUs hit their stock speeds and boosts under their respective stock cooling which is how it should be.

Imagine if you bought anything else and the advertised specifications were not met unless you tweaked it yourself.

 

[Giroro]

If I had to guess I'd say it'd be something in the registry.

I would at least hope that either account deletion/creation or a windows 'refresh' would at least re-initialize user-specific registry entries, so I was getting suspicious there might have been some change to some file in System32. I was having difficulty finding information on what changes software OC tools make to windows. As far as I know, AMD Ryzen Master's changes aren't meant to persist between bootups (which is why the reset to default didn't stick).
Either way CCleaner didn't catch anything in its registry cleanup at least. I don't know if there's better tools though.

 

[RodroX]

Imagine if you bought anything else and the advertised specifications were not met unless you tweaked it yourself.

So, like basically most products sell worldwide, yeah imagine if... (I wonder if someone measured the rpms a vaccum cleaner motor is delivering, it may be under or out of specs, who knows right?)

-----------------------

I don't know why we keep talking about AMD Ryzen 3xxx CPU wont reach "max boost clock", its soo hard to understand thats a Max Value, AMD never wrote on thier website "Every single CPU Ryzen 3XXX, no matter the model will be able to reach thier max full boost clock", it simple said Max boost clock, you may, or not be able to get it, thats how it is (just like when you call a friend and say: "Hey I may be 10 mins late, top", doesn't mean youre gona be 10 mins late, you may get there in time, or you may be there 3 mins late, is a Max Value). It doesn't matter the audience AMD target, I know people and some of them are close friends or coworkers who bought a Ryzen 3xxx and they are all happy with the power delivering, and not even one of them knew about all this controversy.

Ryzen 3xxx series is a new product launch (barely 2 months since it was avialable to public) , of a new fabrication node, that is backward compatible with 2 diferent platafforms and many chipsets.

Specifications are that, specificaction, real world application and use is a diferent thing. CPU are not the only part of a custom build, software and other PC parts all work togheter to achieve a final result. Once again, if every single one wana blame AMD for posting something thats not true, please do, but for me thats having a really narrow point of view.

Once again this is my opinion.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I don't know why we keep talking about AMD Ryzen 3xxx CPU wont reach "max boost clock", its soo hard to understand thats a Max Value, AMD never wrote on thier website "Every single CPU Ryzen 3XXX, no matter the model will be able to reach thier max full boost clock", it simple said Max boost clock, you may, or not be able to get it, thats how it is

Except that's not how it is, or at least not how it's been until recently. AFAIK for past CPUs it was expected that every CPU will be able to hit its max rated boost. Maybe only in certain situations (e.g. single threaded loads), maybe only for a limited period of time, but they would.

I agree, the actual performance difference here is negligible. I see it as more a matter of principle. There are already enough products/services out there where we have to deal with BS specifications of "up to [X speed]", where the provider knows perfectly well that most people are never going to see that speed. I'd prefer it if rated speeds of CPUs didn't go down that path as well.

Edit: Intel isn't blameless here either though. They explicitly state that their max turbo is for a single core, and most of the time even if you're only running a single threaded load it's difficult to get a scenario where all other cores are truly idle (due to background OS activities or whatever). That means you may not ever see the max turbo speed in any semi-realistic scenario. That, combined with the fact they somewhat recently stopped disclosing multi core turbo speeds, means their advertised turbo doesn't necessarily mean much either.

Edit2: Ok, I kind of take this back. Intel has been effectively doing something similar with at least some of their CPUs going back at least several years. So I can't really say that AMD is the one setting a bad precedent here.

 

[joeblowsmynose]

The first and 2nd plots in the article show clock speeds for the entire test duration for an old and new BIOS. Do those not show what you're looking for?

Although I wish they'd just graph the max clock across all cores rather than each individual's core speed. The graphs look pretty messy as-is, especially for the 3900X.

Actually I must have missed that on those two graphs for some reason ... thanks for pointing that out.
The graphs are a bit of a mess.

Re: my concern on the starting points on the graph, the fact that it seems perfectly acceptable that Intel CPUs won't sustain their boost over a certain amount of time, it might be inappropriate to assume that we should throw shade at AMD if this ends up being the behaviour in Ryzen. I'm not saying it is, just that we need to be careful in evaluation as we don't want that conflated with the actual issue - just want to ensure we keep the peanut butter out of the jam jar

Again, thanks for pointing that out.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I wonder what effect, if any, the monitoring software itself might have on boost behavior.

I decided to play around with my 6700K (4.2 GHz turbo for one core, 4 GHz for two or more cores). In the past I never really saw it hit 4.2 GHz running single threaded benchmarks like Cinebench 1T. I thought it may be because of background/OS activities loading other cores slightly. But I decided to try running CB with both CB and my monitoring program (hwinfo) manually assigned to the same core through task manager. Lo and behold, it actually turbo'd to 4.2 GHz! Off and on anyway. So it appears the monitoring software itself was impacting the results.

Now, AMD is a little different in that they don't describe their max boost as being single core only (and in fact explicitly said it wasn't), whereas Intel typically explicitly says it is. But I'm still curious if monitoring software could have an impact. Especially given all the observer effect issues that were seen with Ryzen 3000 with regard to idle temps/clocks/voltages when monitoring software was running.

As an aside, I got a little laugh out of something from Intel's Turbo Boost FAQ:

Q: How can I see the highest Turbo Boost frequency for my processor?
A: If you set the number of cores to one in the BIOS and run the Intel® Processor Identification Utility, it shows the highest Turbo Boost frequency. Make sure you reset the switch in the BIOS to reactivate all cores.

You just have to disable all but one of your cores, such a practical way to realize your max turbo! /s
Although now I'm also curious what would happen to Ryzen boost clocks if you disabled all but on of the cores...

 

[PaulAlcorn]

I wonder what effect, if any, the monitoring software itself might have on boost behavior.

I decided to play around with my 6700K (4.2 GHz turbo for one core, 4 GHz for two or more cores). In the past I never really saw it hit 4.2 GHz, even running cinebench 1T. I thought it may be because of background/OS activities loading other cores slightly. But I decided to try running CB with both CB and my monitoring program (hwinfo) manually assigned to the same core through task manager. Lo and behold, it actually turbo'd to 4.2 GHz! Off and on anyway. So it appears the monitoring software itself was impacting the results.

Now, AMD is a little different in that they don't describe their max boost as being single core only (and if fact explicitly said it wasn't), whereas Intel typically explicitly says it is. But I'm still curious if monitoring software could have an impact. Especially given all the observer effect issues that were seen with regard to idle temps/clocks/voltages when monitoring software was running.

As an aside, I got a little laugh out of something from Intel's Turbo Boost FAQ:

You just have to disable all but one of your cores, such a practical way to realize your max turbo! /s
Although now I'm also curious what would happen to Ryzen boost clocks if you disabled all but on of the cores...

That's a neat trick (assigning HWInfo to the same core). I'll have to borrow that

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I tested my Ryzen 3 1200 with AUTO multiplier and voltage. Ram was at 3333mhz C16.

https://imgur.com/5OtDIrm

View: https://i.imgur.com/5OtDIrm.png


In Cinebench R15 single-threaded test while hardware monitor was open, I observed all 4 cores individually spike to 3.4ghz at one time or another. No cores assigned in task manager.
I am using an Arctic Freezer 34 eSports observed temperatures around 35-40c during the run.

 

[RodroX]

I said it once, and im gona keep saying it unless you get a good amount of Ryzen 3900X/3800X/3700X/3600 custom build PCs (lets said at least 100 of each) under the same roof, ambient conditions, with the same Windows version, drivers and programs installed, on a building with strict security and allow just a small group of people (2 or 3, no more) to run a benchmark like CR single core using the same monitoring tool, with no background apps other than the usual windows services, you really can't be 100% sure that a piece of hardware is not delivering what it is supposed to do.

The survey was a tool to get a "virtual scenario" with real PCs, but that doesn't mean every single entry count as a verified fact.

Can Ryzen 3xxx CPUs have an issue with boost speed?, yes they can.
Is anyone really truly sure AMD have an issue and they are limiting the boosting speed on porpuse?, I bet not.

If this is verified and AMD is to blame, then so for the love of God be it.
But shoulnd't be just shift one gear down, wait and see what happend. Its been only two months since launch, and Intel have had issues in the past and they took a long while to correct some of them.

Even Intel is taking advantage of the situation, but the fact, the real fact remains, and Ryzen 3xxx CPU are still pretty much sold as fast, or even faster than they were on july the 7th.

 

[saint_craig]

A leaked version of AMD's new firmwares that fix the Ryzen 3000 boosting issues landed on the Chiphell forums. We ran a few tests to see if they fix the issue.

AMD's Ryzen 3000 Boost-Fixing BIOS Leaks out, We Test With Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X : Read more

The problem also seems to affect the 2700x series too. The best boost mine will hit is 4000 So it seems the problem exists in the Zen2 Architecture.

I'll have to get my sons, platform up and going to see if the problem also exists in the 1700x too.

 

[TJ Hooker]

The problem also seems to affect the 2700x series too. The best boost mine will hit is 4000 So it seems the problem exists in the Zen2 Architecture.

I'll have to get my sons, platform up and going to see if the problem also exists in the 1700x too.

What are you running when you're looking at boost clocks?

 

[havokagain]

It is march 2020 and MSI x370 Bios code still in beta and not updated . So no increased performance yet then????

 

[TJ Hooker]

It is march 2020 and MSI x370 Bios code still in beta and not updated . So no increased performance yet then????

Just flash the latest beta BIOS. Looked at a couple MSI x370 boards and in both cases the most recent beta BIOS had the latest AGESA version, which means they'll have the boost fix referred to in this article (among other tweaks).

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Don't feel bad, my B350 gaming plus from MSI doesn't even have a single non-beta 3rd gen compatible bios yet.

 

[joeblowsmynose]

Don't feel bad, my B350 gaming plus from MSI doesn't even have a single non-beta 3rd gen compatible bios yet.

I was going to try to plop in a 3900x into my B350 MSI Mortar board. I already installed the latest bios, and my bios OCing features got wrecked -- so annoying.

I may end up with a new board but I prefer mATX with optical sound out ... and I don't think those exist anymore ...

 

[jimmysmitty]

I was going to try to plop in a 3900x into my B350 MSI Mortar board. I already installed the latest bios, and my bios OCing features got wrecked -- so annoying.

I may end up with a new board but I prefer mATX with optical sound out ... and I don't think those exist anymore ...

https://www.newegg.com/global/br-en/asrock-b450m-steel-legend/p/N82E16813157868?&quicklink=true

ASRock seems to have that as an option.

 

[joeblowsmynose]

https://www.newegg.com/global/br-en/asrock-b450m-steel-legend/p/N82E16813157868?&quicklink=true

ASRock seems to have that as an option.

Cool thanks, migt be gettn one of those then - price is decent.