PC Processors

[pioneerspine]

Specs:
CPU: Ryzen 7 2700x (PBO on, all other settings stock)
Motherboard: Asus B450-F Gaming
RAM: 16x2 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz
GPU: PNY RTX 3070 8GB
Cooling: NZXT Krken X62 AIO
PSU: EVGA 650W G3 Gold

So I’ve had this PC for about four years now, and it’s served me well. Honestly, a friend built it for me and I’ve always been too scared to tinker with overclocking, so I never paid it much attention, Plus, in the beginning, this thing could run anything pretty dang well. But it’s getting long in the tooth now, so I’ve started to look into options available to me. And that’s when I found out all this time later about Precision Boost Overdrive.

For the last two or three days I’ve been reading up a lot on it, scouring Reddit and the like. Many say it’s safe with adequate cooling, others that say the voltages it produces are way too high and will damage the CPU over weeks. Lately I have tried setting PBO to “Enabled” in my Asus motherboard’s BIOS. (The default is “Auto,” which is confusing because it seems to be the same as “Disabled,” so I don’t really understand what “Auto” is supposed to mean. But I digress.)

Outside of setting DOCP to get the max 3200MHz out of my RAM, all other settings that would pertain to overclocking are stock. The screenshot I have attached is after 2.5 hours of use, with PBO on. No gaming or high loads took place during that time — I just had a number of Edge tabs open for work — but below we can see the average voltage over that span is 1.429V. Very, very rarely, it’ll dip sub-1V. Those lows only started since I switched to the Windows Balanced power plan, which has the minimum processor state at 5%.

I know that “spikes” from 1.4V to 1.55V are considered normal with PBO. What concerns me is that it’s running firmly in that range, as you can see, pretty much all the time. However, it does not run in that range under full load. If I run a test in Cinebench, voltage falls to around 1.37-1.38V. It’s my understanding that this is normal.

Basically I want to know if PBO is safe to run like this, or if I’m risking the long-term health of the CPU and should simply leave it off, at the expense of slightly worse performance that I’ve noticed in games. Another strange thing about this saga is that I have noticed my BIOS does not contain the same breadth of options for PBO as others’ online. I can activate PBO through Asus’ “AI Tweaker” menu, but most people recommend adjusting it under the “AMD Overclocking” menu in the “Advanced” tab, because that is supposedly AMD’s own spec and it offers more options. The only problem is, AMD Overclocking does not exist for me. Maybe that menu isn’t available for the 2700x?

Thanks for any guidance, and sorry if the details are a little vague. As I said, I’m very new to this.

[johnnyenglish · Accepted solution]

You have a similar system of my last rig.
But I had the RoG Strix E-Version.

First off:

You already have a board that will make use of the PBO unless you disable it.
I understand that its confusing and sometimes between RoG versions there are differences but here it goes.

Auto means, Your CPU decides the PBO
Enabled, Your board decides the PBO
Aggressive if you have it, board will take it further better cooling is advised
Manual if you have it, You can set override values like going above what the CPU can go
Disabled, should disable PBO, at least mine did

Manual will show additional fields to further tinker like temperature override to safeguard your CPU

PBO on enabled is of course a bit risky as the board is calling the shots and it will try to force the CPU on a boosted state for longer when headroom is available.

To counter this you should lower vCore voltages with negative offset -0.1v (thats what I had)

Is it safe to run PBO? I had my 2700X for years like that, and even on Winter time i do "Nuts PBO"
But of course this will cause silicon wear&tear leading to reduced life in the long run. The CPU is still pretty much OK, its my test bench now.

"NUTS PBO" -> Override to +200mhz and some more tweaking to get it boost for much much longer and higher, a good airflow case, intake fans and AIO is advised. (sometimes achieved 4.5ghz on 4cores)

Temperatures were on the upper 70ish like 77 during renderings and peak comsuption was 170Watts. Voltages never went above 1,45v maybe a momentary peak at 1,48v

To be honest, for rendering videos it kind of gave me some benefits, for gaming weren't that much of an improvement, we had a topic in the forum about it.

Good Luck

[pioneerspine]

Thank you so much for the in depth response. Explaining the difference between "Auto" and "Enabled" is extremely helpful, I haven't seen that posted anywhere and I've been reading up on this for days. I was considering a negative offset, -0.05V at first, but -0.1V seems like where most people like to keep it. I've seen others set "levels" of boost but I can't seem to do that with the options available to me. I will give -0.1V a shot and keep an eye on things.

[Anonymous]

My 2700x did work with c state set to off and in ryzen master I think tdc was always near max and marked red.

What is your opinion about c state on and off?

I think bios did reset settings after I installed 5800x3d.

[johnnyenglish]

To be honest, I didn't touched the C-State, left it on AUTO.

But you bring a curious topic, Core States in theory should help the CPU become more efficient by putting some parts of it to sleep, most people disable it to keep the CPU more "alive".

Why did I left it on AUTO?

Disabling C-State on intel systems is bad, the first thing I noticed is Turbo Boosting won't work as intended. So I didn't even bothered to look into it on my system even though its AMD, not even a single benchmark to validate if C State disabled is better for performance.

Why was I messing with C-State on Intel? Long story short.

Dell OptiPlex 7050 is a pain of a computer, almost every one we bought started to throttle and was trying to see if it was a BIOS setting or a C-State related thing. Turns out, its just bad.
The only way to fix it was by disabling BD PROCHOT

let it burn!