Let me rephrase that… is anyone scared they are not able to afford to replace a failed memory module or CPU from overclocking these days?
With the current prices of ram, GPUs, and other components, I can’t see any reason to enable PBO on the AMD 9950X3D2 or the AMD 5975WX CPUs I use (yes, I have the AsRock WRX80 that actually supports PBO). The $800 and $2000 CPU cost is just too prohibitive.
I actually run my 6000 DDR5 at 5200 Mhz. I do leave the 3200 Mhz ECC DDR4 at full speed - as I’ve been running the same 8ch kits for 8 years now without an issue.
So I’m wondering, does anyone else feel the same? Especially now that overclocks are generally mild and doesn’t yield the gains like we had 20 years ago.
/TL;DR
Back in the late 90s, I was the guy who kept hacking and publishing the Tyan S1836 BIOS to unlock the 2nd gen Pentium 2 to go up to 450 Mhz. Then a second hack for the Pentium 3 up to 667 Mhz, and finally a 4th hack for the latest Pentium 3 “socket” adapters of 800 Mhz - allowing overclocking to 933 Mhz. All on the same S1836 motherboard I used for 8 solid years with these mods.
I also held a Top 5 world record of the 800 Mhz FSB LGA775 at 1200 Mhz FSB - on air - and got the discolored heatsinks to prove it. Also I was 3rd on 3D Mark at one time with my dual GTX Titans w/hack bios pushing 450W to each GPU for 95C on air. Fun times.
I’ve built far too many water-cooling rigs and “I sold and guarantee overclocking indefinitely” then I can count for local shops and shipped a few to Hawaii and the EU.
You can call me an overclocker from back in the day when you could double or nearly triple the DDR2, DDR3, RAMBUS, and any Intel CPU with high end ovetclocking. Not today’s mild 2-5% BIOS overclocks before the Gen4 signal looses integrity.
PBO on 5800X3D is amazing reduction in temperature and solid all core overclock. PBO on 9800X3D grants me almost nothing but trouble. It just isn’t worth it anymore.
I remember matching FSB with DDR400 memory on my Athlon XP 3200+ was amazing. I remember getting big easy jump on i5-2500K with just a Hyper 212. If I am not gaining those kinds of improvements anymore I don’t see the point. Just a boring gain with too much cost to risk.
I actually turned off EXPO on my AM5 system a while ago, for this reason (and maybe for somewhat lower idle power consumption, though I haven’t measured the effect, if any). So running 4800 MT/s now instead of 6000 (and I assume lower voltage, though again, I haven’t really looked into that – I should).
Interesting. I thought PBO would increase usage - not save power though. I’ll look into this as one of the kiddos has an 5800X AM4 build.
I’m just setting factory defaults in the BIOS and loading up Bazzite/linux with its default kernel settings for power savings. Idle w/a single M.2 and a Vega64 is around 58W already - no PBO enabled. The case has highend PWM server fans idling at 0% that unplugged drops it to 49W at the wall with 2x 32GB 3200 w/ECC enabled (64GB).
Thanks for confirming I am not the only one downclocking to lesson stress on the CPU’s IMC and DDR5 sticks.
I didn’t really see any idle difference between 6000 and 5200. The X3D CPUs are already a larger power suck at idle than non-X3D CPUs (11-15% per reviews), negating any memory power savings.
oh gosh yeah, I’ve got my 9800x3d at the bleeding edge, why not? Life is short. a 420mm AIO helps but these AM5 chip are designed to be pushed to tjMax regularly as part of any heavy all threads workload
Don’t feed your CPU unsafe voltage, and definitely don’t do so while overheating it, and you’re fine.
Your motherboard should let you define a custom max temp for PBO, I have my 7950X at work stop at 80C. It’s got motherboard limits enabled so it can boost to the moon, so it tends to sit at exactly 80C and 5.2-5.3GHz on~half the cores with PBO. I haven’t sat down and ran an all core/thread bench to see what it clocks to at 100% load. But it never steps over 80C, it stops exactly at that point and boosts no higher.
For DDR5, it should be fast enough with XMP already that you don’t need to poke at it. I’ve seen some chatter about DDR5 failing on some platforms, but the solution I’ve seen along with that is simply to point a fan at it, so… point a fan at it.
Ditto! I setup an 7900X AM5 rig for a local family and it was running way too hot. I couldn’t figure out why it was running so hot with an AIO over my 9950X3D2, and that’s saying something.
Turning off PBO on the 7900X brought it down to mid 80s, as long as I increased the AIO fans. I didn’t think about limiting it’s power but it’s rated to 95C so I let it runm. We’ll see if the family reaches out over time about a failure.
