Question Overclocking a Ryzen 3600

xtremexyz

Honorable
Mar 4, 2018
42
3
10,535
Hi,

I OC'd my Ryzen 3600 CPU to 4.3GHz @ 1.3v and it appears to be stable. Ran Cinebench R23, seems normal. Got a score of 9977. The temperatures seemed high however as it reached up to 92-93c. But it is lower than that in gaming, around 60c up towards mid 70c. Around 45c idle after test. Do I have anymore leeway to up the OC or keep it as it is? Or even remove the OC? Thanks.

Motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk
CPU: Ryzen 3600 3.6GHz
RAM: Corsair 2x16GB 3200MHz Vengeance LPX DDR4
GPU: PowerColor RX 580 8GB
PSU: Corsair CV550w
OS: Windows 11 Pro
 
Cinebench isn't a steady state load and therefore is useless as a metric for determining thermal compliance. For stability, sure, it's useful as ONE tool among many, but for thermal compliance it's not an acceptable standard.

There are a few tools out there which ARE, but among them, the most acceptable one is Prime95 Small FFT, with or without AVX enabled depending on whether you tend to run AVX enabled games or applications and whether or not you have an AVX offset configured in the BIOS. Or even know how to do that.

For most people the standard policy would be to disable ALL of the AVX variants in the Prime95 options on the main torture test screen when you select Small FFT. For 95% of people that will be the right decision.

Your current temps are too high. For Ryzen 3000 series you do not want to see anything above 85°C MAXIMUM while under a full, steady state, all core load. You don't even list your CPU cooler. You're not overclocking using the stock cooler are you? If you are, you need to remove the OC until you have better cooling. You also don't indicate what case or what your case cooling solution looks like either. These are all important considerations if you are going to overclock the CPU or memory, and to some degree even your graphics card.

Another problem I see is that you are using a VERY low end power supply. The fact that it's only 550w, which barely meets the recommendation for an RX 580 equipped system with a stock configuration, says that for any kind of daily driver that you expect or would like to see last a while, this is a very bad idea. It's not good quality to begin with and when you pile on the additional demands of overclocking you are seriously shortening the lifespan of that PSU and possibly your other hardware as well since a highly taxed PSU, especially when it's not good quality, is bound to have more measurable problems with voltage regulation, ripple and signal noise. All of which can kill your hardware, a little bit at a time.

If you are using stock cooling and that power supply, I'd say you'd be wise to completely remove any OC until you have better cooling and a better quality power supply. Preferably one that's more like 650-750w AND is good quality. And by good quality, I don't just mean "Gold rated" or some well known name brand. It needs to be a MODEL that is known to be reliable and uses quality components inside, as well as having at least decent to preferably good build quality, soldering, etc. plus using a platform that allows for sufficient cooling. Performance is a major factor as well, and professional reviews are how we determine which models or platforms tend to have these things.