Overclocking The AMD Ryzen APUs: Guide and Results
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on April 16, 2018 2:30 PM ESTOverclocking The Ryzen 2000 Series APUs: The Conclusion
If we go back to our Ryzen 2000 Series APU review, it is clear that the Ryzen 3 2200G ($99) and Ryzen 5 2400G ($169) are true winners when it comes to building a gaming system on a budget, without making too much of a sacrifice, especially when focusing on popular gaming titles that do not require ultimate horsepower. Puting the Zen architecture with a good amount of Vega cores is mouthwatering for budget aficionados, as Intel offers nothing for this performance at this price. From an overclocking perspective, the Ryzen 2000 series does have more to offer, providing the system is well-rounded enough and capable of doing so; the APUs may be fully unlocked, but the system will need a B350/X370 chipset board to progress above the defaulted stock specifications.
In our testing, a consistent jump in performance was apparent when the CPU frequency, integrated graphics frequency, and memory, were all overclocked. We have already seen and delved into how memory scales on Ryzen CPUs, but with the capability of increasing and overclocking the Vega cores on the iGPU proves very fruitful in gaming. The only caveat with overclocking comes through extra power consumption and heat, but even with a modest overclock of 3.9 GHz on the 2200G, pushing memory up to DDR4-3333, and the integrated graphics to 1360 MHz, temperatures are well within the recommended guidelines when using a big cooler. This might be a drawback however, as the cooler bundled with the APUs was not up to the task of such a heavy push.
There are reports of the Ryzen 2000 series APUs going further than our sample was able to achieve. In each case our limit was on the temperatures, so we have a future article planned on delidding the processors and testing the difference to see if it is worth popping the heatspreader off to get a few more degrees off. As it stands, overclocking the Ryzen APUs has many benefits, and although they'll never reach the performance of processor at double the cost, for the market they are intended, an extra 7-30% (depending on the benchmark) is quite handy to have.
Overclocking is Dead: Long Live Overclocking
If we go back to the previous decade, processors such as the Q6600 were a prime example of when tweaking more than just the multiplier was required to get a decent overclock: the base clock was paramount in making extra performance. At the time, for that chip at least, the core multiplier was down at x9, and a base clock of 266 MHz gave the chip a frequency of 2.4 GHz. The only way to push the CPU frequency beyond that was by increasing the base clock.
The times where base clock overclocking was an important tuning factor to increasing performance has now changed. There have been times since where going +/- 10 MHz have been possible since, although that depended on the rest of the system (PCIe, chipset, DRAM) remaining stable. The only real need for base clock overclocking is in a competitive nature, where people compete against each other to see who has the bigger overclock. Being able to tune that important extra frequency on the CPU and memory can be the difference between a world record score or 30th place.
Even with AMD’s Zen core architecture, there has been the question popping up around on reddit and various communities about whether or not it’s worth overclocking purely with the multiplier or adding in some base clock tuning. The fact that the majority of the motherboards currently available on the AM4 socket do not have external clock generators means that extreme base clock tuning isn’t possible, and doesn’t give much weight to the users that want it. But the upside is that it is a lot easier for mainstream users to overclock especially processors like the Ryzen CPUs and Ryzen APUs.
Is Overclocking the Ryzen 2000 Series APUs Worth it?
The Ryzen 2000 series really can benefit from being pushed beyond the rated specifications by overclocking. Even within the safe parameters as specified by AMD in terms of voltages, the gains when the CPU core clock, graphics frequency, and memory are all pushed equate to a nice jump in performance. This can be the difference between playing at a decent frame rate and the game chopping around. Sure, the Ryzen series as a whole can benefit from an overclock, but for integrated gaming, overclocking the integrated graphics can a difference if the user requires the extra performance but doesn’t want to be burdened with the extra cost of upgrading.
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Alexvrb - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
One thing that was odd about an older stock Asrock board I was using was that you had to update to the "Bridge BIOS" (3.4? I think) before you could flash the latest 4.50. But it wasn't a big deal because Instant Flash did not even acknowledge the 4.x BIOS until I flashed the bridge BIOS. Shrug.Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Your OC's are a joke, you don't OC the cpu a part at all, it's worthless with a chip that runs at 3600Mhz base, you focus solely on the igpu.1.3v for soc voltage 1600-1700Mhz pretty much guranteed on any chip properly OCed
Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
OCing the cpu part only takes aways precious heat that gpu could benefit from.gavbon - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
This particular piece isn't the end of the testing, it's only the first part. Each stage including CPU frequency, memory frequency and iGPU frequency is being analyzed/tested. Where someone looking to opt for a Ryzen 2000 series APU over say an Intel i3/i5, not everyone automatically buys an APU marketed at gaming just solely for gaming.Rest assured, each element is being deep dived to determine sweet spots for specific tasks and uses. Of course, gaming will benefit more from increased iGPU clock speed, but not everything will and every motherboard I've tested on AM4 has multiple overclocking profiles available so setting an overclock for each individual need is easier than ever.
id4andrei - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
In sentiment with the OP, I will add that Techspot has reached 1600 Mhz on the GPU side of the 2200G by abandoning the CPU side altogether and that with the stock cooler. For the budget conscious gamers a GPU only approach would make more sense.gavbon - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Yeah achieving higher clocks on the iGPU is possible if you completely ignore overclocking the CPU, that much is true! Of course we have to explore all the avenues as not everyone games, and you'll see the script as more of the series (around 4-5 pieces in total including this one) get published.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - link
Hi Gavin,If you can, please go one step further: undervolt the CPU, and then see how far you can push the iGPU, even (or especially) on the stock cooler. Also, while you're at it, do the reverse - undervolt the iGPU, and overclock the CPU, and see how far it can be pushed on the stock cooler. For example, if I run handbrake to compress the 4K videos from my camera, I don't care much about iGPU speed, but take all the sped the CPU can give me. With gaming, it's usually the opposite.
SanX - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Hi overclockers. Looking back i feel like probably one of the world oldest overclockers. Such happened that i overclocked my 4.77MHz IBM PC XT -like comp soldered on the knees from low integration chips on the home-made motherboard to ~10MHz continuously. That was in the middle of 1980th. Overlock happened just by lucky chance that i had no crystal oscillators so just the LC-based variable freq generator was made for it and it was easy to change its frequency. The overclocking was on air up to approx 10 MHz, after which dirt started to appear on the TV which was used as a monitor. Sometimes the dry ice was used too (but mostly to find bad overheating chips). Then when i added missing FP-coprocessors this computer gave me orders of magnitude larger computer power then i was getting on my job where of course the entire institute of 1000s of people time-shared couple mainframes getting very little each. There was also one very funny moment with this overclocked PC. That was the behavior of floppy drives "on steroids" when computer was more then 2x overclocked. Drives were spinning, opening, closing and reading data so fast and also producing noise of lifting rocket, that my friends who also were making their own computers, laughed hysterically. I overclock each and every computer since then.Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Great article. One thing though: the position of the two processors in the charts is not always the same. At first the R5 is always #1 and the R3 is #2, but then it changes in the discrete section and even changes within the F1 section again.bcronce - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
" I find it amusing to note that DRAM bit-errors, unaffected by overclocking, can happen on the scale of one per GB per four years (or less). That's about a worse case scenario, but it translates to about one bit-error per three months in a system with 16GB."Googling the topic, I'm seeing most sources say in the area of 1 bit error per 1GiB per hour.