Question My CPU is running well above its base speed and I haven't overclocked or tampered with it in any way

[khkhkhkhflamgo]

I have an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, it's base speed is 3.70 but it goes up to 4.30 even though I haven't OC'ed it at all. Can someone tell me if this is normal or should I be worried?


Another thing is that my GPU is an RTX 3060 (not Ti) and everyone I've talked to has said It's getting bottlenecked because of my CPU since my CPU is much less "Powerful" than my GPU. I said this because I was wondering if my CPU going to a higher clock than normal (as stated before) would in any way damage my CPU and/or GPU.

 

[cdrkf]

That is normal behaviour for a 5600X - the speed is listed as 3.7ghz base, up to 4.6ghz max boost. It's normal for the CPU to sit somewhere between the base and max speed depending on what you are doing and how good your cooling is (better cooling should result in higher average clocks).

The base speed is the guaranteed minimum if you are running the CPU flat out on a task that loads all the cores (e.g. video encoding). The max boost is the speed the cpu will hit if running a task that only uses a single core. For everything else it will be in-between.

With respect to the RTX 3060 - that seems like a sensible pairing with a 5600X. It shouldn't be a bottleneck in most situations although it somewhat depends on what games you play and at what settings.

If you are playing E-Sports games (CS:GO, Fortnite etc), and you are looking for very high frame rates at lowest settings (e.g. 1080p, low) then the 5600X will limit the max fps you can hit as those settings shift all the load onto the CPU. If you are playing with max detail settings, or with RTX on, or at higher resolutions (e.g. 1440p) then the GPU load will be higher and you will be GPU limited (which is what gamers usually want - the GPU running at 100% load).