[SOLVED] Ryzen 3950x Clock Speeds & Power Plans

[Fluffly Fluff]

When my rig with this CPU is set to Power Saver the clock speeds literally stay stuck at 1720 MHz endlessly and never move. This is when browsing and even gaming playing World of Warcraft. Is this odd?

Also, when set to AMD Ryzen High Performance, and when just idle doing nothing, or looking at a webpage and browsing--super low demand stuff, the clock speeds bounce around between 3599 MHz and 4324 MHz, without ever dropping below that. I mean, I have a rig with an Intel chip and can set it to High Performance and the CPU with go way down to 1200 MHz no problem when idle and then back up to 4500 MHz or so with higher demand stuff, like gaming.

When set to Balanced (recommended) the behavior is the same as when at the AMD Ryzen High Performance setting, without ever dropping below 3599 MHz. This is even when nothing is open and no keys or the mouse are touched for five minutes.

This is the first time I have built a PC with an AMD chip and wonder if this is odd. Honestly, I would rather have a chip that adjusts as needed like Intel chips. Is this not the case with AMD and especially this relatively high end 16 core chip?

 

[kerberos_20]

you can edit power profile to set minimum and maximum cpu speed there (in percentages)

 

[alexbirdie]

I am using the 1usmus universal power saving plan. I set minimum and maximum power level to 100%. It works quite well for me since more than a year.

 

[drea.drechsler]

....
Also, when set to AMD Ryzen High Performance, and when just idle doing nothing, or looking at a webpage and browsing--super low demand stuff, the clock speeds bounce around between 3599 MHz and 4324 MHz, without ever dropping below that.
....

That's the way Ryzen works; even in light processing it boosts briefly to a high clock for one or a few cores then pulls back, rotating the boost to different cores. It's very much different from the way Intel works as you've found .

Also, when set up right the CPU puts cores into C6 deep sleep (when clock is at zero) power state as frequently as it can, making 'boost or sleep' decisions as often as 100 times a second. Most utilities can't show when it's in C6 as that would bring the core out of C6 just to report it's power state. So it shows some intermediate clock speed instead, usually around 3500 or 3600Mhz. Also, monitoring utility polling periods are way, way slower than every 1mS so they miss the vast majority of the 'sleep' time of a core anyway.

Just make sure you've installed the latest chipset drivers for your board and have Advanced C States enabled in your BIOS and it will do it's best power saving even with AMD's Ryzen power plans.

 

[CountMike]

Minimum processor state can be set to 5% or even less but depending on BIOS and chipset driver it may not react at all.
If it works, most cores should go to sleep mode in true (under 1%) CPU load.

 

[Fluffly Fluff]

you can edit power profile to set minimum and maximum cpu speed there (in percentages)

Thanks for the tip off. Apparently setting those and the cooling policy plus adjusting the Windows Power mode bar (seems to be a feature on some systems (?)) to your liking helped to set this up perfectly.

My clocks speeds now seem to be moving around in a healthy way as opposed to being locked at a narrow range or one speed.