[SOLVED] Partial overclock possible?

[scallumal]

Hi everyone I am hoping for help from more professional overclockers I have a Ryzen 1700 and Im wondering is there anyway for me to only overclock 4cores and leave the other 4 at base or a lower clock? Reason why I want to do this is for gaming and I don't want to have all cores overclockes for games

 

[Darkbreeze]

Certainly it COULD be done, by manually adjusting the core clocks in the BIOS on a per core basis, but honestly it's pointless to do so. You'll see better gains with moderate all core factory boost speeds on ALL cores, than you will by locking half your cores at their stock speeds and overclocking the remainder of cores. The only way you'd see any gains from a similar configuration would be on specific titles that do not have good multicore optimization, in which case the very little amount of overclocking headroom on most Ryzen systems probably isn't going to be enough beyond what they boost to automatically anyhow to be worth doing, and the fact is that most current games are either very much geared for multithreaded performance or are headed that way in the very near future.

There's a good reason that both Intel and AMD are adding increasing numbers of cores and hyperthreads and intentionally taking yourself out of that beneficial configuration makes no practical sense these days. It's not like the old days when we used to get a highly binned i7, turn off the hyperthreading and crank up the clock speed on the four physical cores as high as they could remain stable and thermally compliant at.

If you can't get a stable overclock on all cores, that is higher than the natural all core boost speed, then you either have a motherboard without a good VRM configuration, a poorly binned CPU sample or a lack of adequate cooling, or some combination of all three. Your generation of Ryzen is simply not particularly friendly towards overclocking in general because even professional overclockers with top shelf supporting hardware have rarely been able to achieve much beyond the stock boost that is stable enough to run as a daily driver.