AMD Ryzen 7 9700x CPU Review: Performance, Thermals & Power Analysis

Overclocking Procedure & Results

AMD devotes one and a half pages in its reviewer guide for overclocking, showing that it pays great attention to it. Unfortunately, the Powenetics software couldn’t read any CPU sensor information except core load, so I couldn’t extract all the data I wanted. Nevertheless, despite my limited time to deliver this review on time (I only got the CPU two days before the NDA’s end time), I still decided to try every possible overclocking option.

I will repeat here some of what I wrote in the Overclocking section, with fewer details, and in a more straightforward way. So, the steps you have to follow to proceed with the CPU’s overclock are the following:

1. Enable PBO Advanced and set limits to ‘motherboard.’
2. Set PBO Scalar to between 7X and 10X.
3. Set CPU Boost Clock override to somewhere between +100 MHz and + 200 MHz. I tried +150 MHz.

Enabling Ryzen Master “Auto OC” does 1-3 automatically with a single click, so you can do that without messing with the BIOS settings. Personally, I prefer the BIOS over any app.

The next important step is to set the Curve Optimizer steps. A good start is to perform something like -10 to -15 Curve Optimizer steps on available CCDs and then look at stability for boot and their workloads of interest. I went with -15 at first, but the results weren’t the expected ones, so I also tried -10. A good trick here is to use the Ryzen Masters “Derive” Function (this can be done on a per-core basis but will take longer) to automatically derive values and then use those directly or as a baseline and then tweak from there.

The new Curve Shaper allows for fine-grained control of the curve at defined temperature and frequency bands, but because it requires time, which I didn’t have, I didn’t mess with it.

You can even set a manual CPU clock, but you also have to set an operating voltage manually. This setting overrides any Precision Boost Overdrive settings. I wouldn’t advise messing with this overclocking option unless you know what you are doing because setting a high Vcore value can cause permanent damage to the processor.

The last and most important step is to enable the EXPO profile of your RAM DIMMs if they have one. This will ensure the best possible RAM performance without any headaches.

The Results

Whatever I tried, I didn’t manage to beat the “default + EXPO” settings combination.

Default Settings + EXPO	Ryzen Master “Auto OC”

As you can see in these screenshots, with the default settings, the max CPU frequency might be lower, but it is kept steady, while with the “Auto OC” function, it drops notably under heavy loads, leading to lower overall performance.