New AMD bios = lower firestrike

[JunoNH]

http://i.imgur.com/XfzHAPE.png

The most recent bios has swiped nearly 1500 points off my combined firestrike score.

Sure my memory will run at 3066 instead of 2667 now, but apparently it hurts performance. Have tried returning to the lower mem clocks but no effect.

After checking similar builds I can see no one has posted a top score since early June which was around the time of the new bios so it seems to match up.

Why would a new bios make a chip worse?

 

[Seanie280672]

http://i.imgur.com/XfzHAPE.png

The most recent bios has swiped nearly 1500 points off my combined firestrike score.

Sure my memory will run at 3066 instead of 2667 now, but apparently it hurts performance. Have tried returning to the lower mem clocks but no effect.

After checking similar builds I can see no one has posted a top score since early June which was around the time of the new bios so it seems to match up.

Why would a new bios make a chip worse?

Its always the same thing when AMD release an AGESA updte, my Cinebench score has droppped from around 1703 point to 1689 points, not a massive drop, but still a drop, the next bios or 2 will be when board manufacturers tweak the bios a bit more and get it back up to speed, at the moment, bioses are being rushed out to fix issues.

At the moment they are just trying to get ram speeds up, and support more ram without thinking too much about performance.

 

[derekullo]

The Ryzen chips love fast memory so any change that degrades memory performance will hurt the cpu score and therefore your combined score.

It's possible they relaxed some of the memory timings for compatibility reasons.

Your graphics and physics scores actually increased for some reason.

Does the fps in games feel lower or is it just this synthetic score that is lower?

 

[JunoNH]

I've barely gamed at all to be honest only had this rig for a few weeks so couldn't tell you.

I mean it has other issues as well that i'm ironing out (super high tdp well above 100 when OC'd, cmos resets after any significant downtime), but exactly as you state the individual scores are looking better so combined must be a RAM issue right?

 

[JunoNH]

Just to elaborate there were a couple of additional factors I hadn't considered or forgot about.

I had changed some of the NVidia control panel settings for more quality, and I changed from CPU PhysX to GPU.

Having changed the PhysX back to CPU the score has improved but I am still no where near my previous score.

There also seemed to be some issue with shorting as I then later had a problem with booting, as an error message would come up claiming a USB port was overpowered. Reading into some other threads helped me solve that issue but alas I may have to concede that the shown clock speed isn't accurate. More than likely it was XFR'ing on the insane volts to above 4.2ghz as testified by a CPUid I ran sometime afterward. Unfortunately I spooked at the score and turned off my PC straight away to avoid damaging the chip.

Since then I have used the most recent beta bios and clocked down to avoid additional concern. Right now i'm getting 16200 firestrike with 3.9ghz with settings focussed on quality over performance.

It appears the BIOS may only have a minor effect compared to the above factors. I suspect now I've sorted the shorting issue it's probable even with 4ghz+ and performance settings on my GPU i'd be unlikely to get above 17000.