[SOLVED] The Ryzen 3700x is quite interesting, or at least mine is

[BrandonFitzpatricc]

When I first got my 3700x, I attempted to overclock it manually, but whenever I overclocked it to 4.0 ghz or above, it caused my games to either freeze or crash. I’ve heard that each individual chip has a different boost clock, for example other 3700x chips might be able to reach a higher boost clock on the same motherboard. So I figured that I just got unlucky, but I think I was wrong. Since then, I’ve done research on precision boost overdrive, and decided to turn it on. The results by doing this surprised me a lot. Turning on PBO automatically overclocked my CPU to 4.4 ghz, which seems to be stable so far. I’m not sure why, considering that I can’t even get a stable manual overclock as high, but at the same time I’m really impressed.

 

[mdd1963]

Manual will try to OC all the cores to a desired target, whereas PBO will typically have just one core near max boost, as technically, that is all AMD really advertises, with the other's 300-400 MHz lower... (Certainly, not all cores are likely to hit max advertised boost, and, this varies by which mainboard is used, and which firmware..)

Here is an interesting video on what was achieved with Hardware Unboxed's sample CPUs, comparing sample 3700X vs. a 3800X

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3u9cx_Gn8o&t=332s

 

[-Fran-]

It's a bit more complex than that, as it will try to boost every core it can to a higher P state if there's power and thermal room available.

Manual overclocking is not dynamic and will put a heavy burden on the power side, so, ironically, PBO is now better for OC than manual OC.

Cheers!