Quote:According to DigiTimes, the B550 and A520 chipsets support the PCIe 3.0 standard, but it's too early to rule out that they won't feature PCIe 4.0. For starters, PCIe 4.0 is backward compatible with PCIe 3.0, so B550 and A520 motherboards could support PCIe 4.0, but in a limited way. If we look back at the Ryzen 3000-series launch, the third-generation processors have as much as 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes at their disposal. So it's plausible that B550 and A520 motherboards can have their first PCIe x16 slot and one M.2 port wired directly to the processor.

From a monetary standpoint, it makes perfect sense to restrict PCIe 4.0 support on B550 and A520 motherboards. They are budget chipsets after all, and it would help reduce costs so the final product could be more accessible. As MSI CEO Charles Chiang recently told us in an interview, even the entry-level offerings are expected to be more expensive in comparison to the previous-gen AMD motherboards. It's understandable to restrict feature sets to meet certain pricing criteria.

Quote:Recently, data miners poking around in the BIOS files of upcoming Gigabyte X570 motherboards have come across references to an "X590" chipset, which does not officially exist yet. In these BIOSes, many options are labeled as for "X570/590 chipsets." The developer for the Ryzen DRAM Calculator also hinted at an X590 chipset on Twitter, saying "AMD X590 and more possibilities coming soon" with an attached picture of a mostly blacked-out motherboard save for the corners; the Tweet has since been deleted.
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It's also entirely possible that X590 is actually a misnomer made by Gigabyte. If Gigabyte wasn't sure what the chipset would be called (remember the canceled Z490 chipset for AM4?), then it's entirely possible Gigabyte internally referred to this upcoming chipset as "X570/590." The X590 listing is never referred to alone, always with X570 right beside it, and technically it's not stated in the BIOS files at all, it has only been inferred with a listing of "590." And like Z490, it is possible that X590 was planned at one point, but also canceled.

Quote:There are two distinct ways of interpreting this information.

One, that motherboards based on B550 and A520 completely lack PCIe gen 4.0, including the main PCI-Express x16 (PEG) slot and the M.2 slot wired to the AM4 SoC; and two, that only the downstream PCIe lanes and the chipset bus are PCIe gen 3.0, while the main PEG slot and M.2 slot from the SoC remain gen 4. We lean toward the latter interpretation being more plausible, that AMD B550 and A520 motherboards will at least feature one PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, and one M.2 slot that has PCI-Express 4.0 x4 wiring from the AM4 SoC; while the ASMedia chipset is connected to the SoC over PCI-Express 3.0 x4, and downstream PCIe lanes put out by the chipset are gen 3.0, too. These ASMedia-sourced AMD 500-series chipset motherboards could also implement the latest PCB, CPU VRM, and memory wiring specifications released by AMD that enable CPU and memory overclocking levels unattainable on motherboards based on older chipsets.

Quote:El Chapuzas Informático has posted an early review of the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 which was tested on a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi motherboard, G.Skill FlareX DDR4 @ 3200 MHz and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE graphics card. Looking at the data presented, it becomes clear the performance on offer if real looks to be quite impressive. The site compared AMD's latest offering to the Intel Core i9-9900K and the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with the Ryzen 5 3600 typically slotting in between the two and in some cases beating both. This is interesting to note as the Ryzen 7 2700X offers similar clock speeds to the Ryzen 5 3600 but the former has a 2C/4T advantage. Even so, the newer AMD CPU tends to outpace the Zen+ based Ryzen 7 2700X in multiple tests. In Cinebench R15, for example, the Ryzen 5 3600 had the lead in single-core performance while multi-core was held by the Ryzen 7 2700X. Cinebench R20 roughly mimics these results as well.
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You can check the full review at the source below, and while the results appear plausible, we suggest taking them with a grain of salt.

Quote:Back in the early days of SSDs, Intel’s platforms provided consumers the fastest storage performance they could ask for. Hence, storage reviewers used mainstream Z-series platforms and i7 CPUs to extract the highest performance possible from the latest storage devices. We even initially began this article to demonstrate why this old trend continues.

However, recently, AMD’s platforms are really pulling ahead. If we consider the impact of the latest Spectre and Meltdown security mitigations, which punish storage performance under numerous circumstances and shaves off a lot of Intel's advantage, it seems the tables have turned in AMD's favor.

In contrast to our initial suspicions and historical data, storage performance on AMD platforms is actually now very comparable to Intel. As a matter of fact, the latest security patches seem to have turned raw storage benchmarks in favor of the red team. And we did our testing on the AMD side on X470. With the new X570 chipset and Ryzen 3000 CPUs about to arrive, flush with bandwidth-doubling PCIe 4.0 support, AMD's position on the storage front is likely to improve--at least after the platform irons out any early issues revolving around BIOS updates and drivers.
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AMD has come a long way with its Ryzen architecture. Team Red now tramples on Intel during synthetic tests. Interestingly enough, however, while synthetic storage performance has shifted in AMD’s favor, and at some points it was surprising to see just how much of a lead it has, our application benchmarks show the two trade blows depending on the specific task and interface. Performance with SATA SSDs proved roughly the same overall, which was great to see.

This is why we always carry out comparisons with results based upon the same system. Although the Intel i7 9700K lacks the additional eight threads that the Ryzen 7 2700X has, its architecture with faster Turbo frequencies made it come out on top in productivity, even with the latest vulnerability mitigations. And in PCMark 8, our Intel system enjoyed a 7-16% lead with PCIe SSDs, and the Intel system boots faster overall.
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Game loading times also went in favor of the AMD platform. Surprisingly enough on that front, AMD’s platform even allowed the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus to outperform the $2,200 1.5TB Intel Optane SSD 905P. But this doesn’t mean the AMD system is faster than the Intel system during actual gameplay.

Quote:AMD recently raised the bar for memory support with the latest Ryzen 3000-series processors, and we know how past Ryzen processors just love speedy memory. ASRock has listed the optimum memory speeds and memory configurations for AMD's Ryzen 3000-series Matisee processors and X570-based motherboards.

The third-generation Ryzen chips arrive with native support for the DDR4-3200 standard out of the box. You can still run faster memory if your processor's Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) and motherboard are up to the task. Take ASRock's flagship X570 Taichi motherboard, which supports memory speeds up to DDR4-4666 and faster with overclocking.
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ASRock recommends you only populate up to two memory slots if you aim for DDR4-3200. It doesn't matter if you use single-rank or dual-rank DDR4-3200 memory kits. However, things start to get complicated when you start filling all four memory slots. When all four memory slots are populated with single-rank memory modules, the official memory speed drops to DDR4-2933. And if you use a combination of single-rank and dual-rank memory modules, your best best is DDR4-2667 with a four-DIMM configuration.

Do you have to follow ASRock's recommendations to the letter? Enthusiasts have been defying hardware manufacturers' specifications for ages now. We ourselves have gotten DDR4-3466 memory to play nice with the Ryzen 7 2700X, which is only rated for DDR4-2933. But if you don't feel like playing the silicon lottery or spending time tweaking, then you should probably listen to ASRock's advice though.

Quote:AMD will differentiate its high-end Ryzen 9 desktop processor PIB (processor-in-a-box) retail package from that of the Ryzen 7 series with a more premium-looking box. Retailer PC Part Picker put up this picture of the Ryzen 9 box up-close, which also surfaced in E3-2019 presentations by AMD.

Quote:Overall, this result seems legitimate, but AMD's lowest-end Zen 2 CPU beating the -9900K overall seems unrealistic at best, especially when AMD positions the beefier Ryzen 7 3800X against the Core i9-9900K. This benchmark does, however, prove that Zen 2 does some things far better than Coffee Lake, which bodes well for Zen 2's overall performance. July 7th is just eight days away now, so it won't be long before we know what the Ryzen 5 3600 can really do.

Quote:The purported Ryzen 9 3950X ES, overclocked to 5.42 GHz, scores a gargantuan 5,501 points in the multi-threaded benchmark. To put this number into perspective, at stock frequencies, a Ryzen Threadripper 2950X (same core-count, double the memory bus width), scores 3,645 points. The 3950X benefits from not just its massive overclock that's over 1 GHz higher than the stock TR-2950X, but also higher IPC, and a more consolidated memory interface. This feat goes to show that AMD's upcoming Ryzen chips love to overclock, and deliver a significantly higher single-thread performance over the previous generation.

Quote:AMD's 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processors were rumored to open to pre-orders today, so you could have your swanky new CPU upgrade in place by 7/7. It turns out, that's not the case. AMD in a statement to TechPowerUp, confirmed that there won't be any pre-orders opened by retailers today (1st July), and there is no information of any such pre-orders date. Customers will likely have to wait until the 7th to pick their PIB form their friendly neighbourhood PC hardware store, or order one online.

Quote:The Ryzen processors are extremely competitive in performance across the full span of our gaming and application test suites, notching impressive wins in heavily-threaded applications and significantly narrowing the gap in the lightly-threaded applications that Intel has traditionally dominated. To put things in perspective, consider that the overclocked Ryzen 7 2700X rarely matched the stock performance of the Ryzen 7 3700X.

Intel still holds the absolute performance crown in gaming, but much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

Quote:In the 18 years I’ve covered the IT industry, AMD has never beaten Intel to a node, until now. Nearly 20 years ago, AMD effectively tied Intel when both firms began shipping 180nm parts at very nearly the same time. It never happened again. Thereafter, Intel moved to new nodes months or even years before its competitor, until today.

Even allowing for the fact that Intel’s 10nm and TSMC’s 7nm are considered to be roughly equivalent, AMD is about to have 7nm CPUs and GPUs in-market at volume. Intel currently has a single 10nm Core i3-8121 that ships without a GPU and is only used in a handful of low-end systems.

That’s a clean, solid, AMD win.
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When Intel launched the Core i9-9900K, we noted that both it and the 2700X were excellent products, but that AMD had a death grip on the performance-per-dollar category. That’s no longer the case. Dollar-for-dollar, the Core i9-9900K is annihilated in multi-threaded applications by the Ryzen 9 3900X and slightly exceeded in overall non-gaming performance by the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X.

Intel has no easy short-term answer here. There are rumors of a 10-core desktop on the horizon, but 14nm TDPs at high clock and core count are not friendly to anyone. AMD already has a 16-core desktop chip coming in September, and while it may not scale as well as its Threadripper equivalent due to limited memory bandwidth, it’ll scale well enough. Like the concept of a fleet in being, the existence of that 16-core CPU is tangible proof that AMD has gas in the tank and products it can introduce to drive performance higher.
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We’d like to see if AMD can bring idle power on the Ryzen 7 family down at all, and the CPU’s relatively high single-thread power consumption is a little puzzling, but the Ryzen 7 3700X and 3900X’s execution efficiency is, in a word, excellent. AMD has more than delivered on the improvements that it promised.

Quote:Any time a company talks up its products, you have to take it with a measure of salt. AMD in particular has a history of making bombastic claims of dubious merit, but this time around, that’s not the case. The leaps that these processors make from their second-generation forebears are the sort of generational improvements that make me wistfully recall the era of the Athlon thumping the Pentium 4. We’re not to that point again—yet—but these are the first Ryzen CPUs that I can recommend unreservedly, and that’s definitely worthy of a TR Editor’s Choice award.

Quote:Priced at $500, the Ryzen 9 3900X goes up right against the Intel Core i9-9900K that's priced similarly. Unlike the Intel processor, AMD was kind enough to include a heatsink with their processor, so you can get your new rig set up immediately. This included heatsink is not some cheap, low-quality heatsink, but a decent cooler. Congratulations, AMD!

Quote:Priced at $330, the Ryzen 7 3700X is relatively affordable and cheaper than the $410 Intel Core i7-9700K. Unlike the Intel processor, AMD was kind enough to include a heatsink with their processor, so you can get your new rig set up immediately. The included heatsink is not some cheap low-quality heatsink, but a great cooler that can handle the processor's heat output with ease. Pricing of the processor itself has remained flat over the generations. The 3700X launches at the same $329 as the 2700X did. What has changed, though, is platform cost. AMD X570 chipset motherboards are significantly pricier than boards based on X470. Luckily, these processors offer backwards-compatibility with older platforms. Guess AMD no longer has to compete on price alone—the Ryzen 7 3700X is an excellent choice that's almost seeing eye to eye with Intel.

Quote:With this data, and the data from our PCIe gen 4.0 scaling article, we are happy to report that you can save yourself anywhere between $70 to $150 by choosing an X470 motherboard over an X570 variant. There are no tangible performance gains to be had as there is no apparent overclocking headroom increase with our review cooling solution and memory kit (which uses Samsung B-die), and certainly nothing is to be gained from PCIe gen 4.0 for now. You even get the added benefit of a motherboard chipset that truly runs Cool & Quiet.

Quote:Our first impressions with 3rd generation Ryzen's memory overclocking capabilities are very optimistic. The processor is capable of memory frequencies well beyond the DDR4-3600 most 2nd generation Ryzen chips cap out at as stability of the Infinity Fabric interconnect beyond that point starts to buckle. Frequencies such as DDR4-4000 require a lot of skill and a lot more luck with the older Ryzens. Achieving this frequency with Zen 2 is fairly straightforward, which has AMD win with memory overclocking headroom. In our main review of the Ryzen 9 3900X, we dive deep into the processor's architecture, going more into detail on the memory, too. One of the things we explain is that decoupling memory frequency from that of the Infinity Fabric interconnect will pay big dividends when it comes to memory overclocking.

Overall, when looking at the application averages, there's barely a five percent performance gain to be had going from DDR4-2400 to DDR4-3600. Once you take a closer look at the individual tests, it becomes apparent that some apps simply like high memory clock, whereas others prefer tighter timings over the highest clock, and then there are those with barely any performance differences between memory speeds at all.

Games are a different story from applications as they tend to be more memory bandwidth hungry. Maybe counterintuitively, it's the FPS rate that drives the memory requirements instead of the resolution. At higher resolutions like 1440p and 4K, the GPU is the limiting factor, and the CPU is running at a lighter load than at lower resolutions. For each frame, the game has to calculate many things and adjust the scene geometry; as FPS goes up, so does the load. At 720p, there is a 10 percent performance increment to be had when going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-3200. When looking at the more real-life 1080p resolution, the gap is still 7%. Depending on your choice of graphics card, gaining that much FPS with a memory upgrade could actually end up being cheaper than buying a faster graphics card. There are of course exceptions on both sides. Some games prefer bandwidth to latency, while others prefer latency, with games generally favoring bandwidth.

Quote:AMD succeeded in delivering on its backwards-compatibility promise for the 3rd generation Ryzen processors on motherboards based on AMD 300-series and 400-series chipsets. This promise was very close to being derailed suggests a community thread on MSI forums. According to MSI representatives active on the forum, the capacity of the SPI flash EEPROM chip that stores the motherboard UEFI firmware is woefully limited to cram in the AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3a microcode on many of its motherboards.
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The scary part? Most other motherboard brands appear to be using 16-megabyte EEPROMs on their older socket AM4 motherboards. These companies are bound to run into similar ROM capacity issues unless they keep their UEFI setup programs lightweight. Motherboards based on the latest X570 chipset feature 32-megabyte EEPROMs. The AMD X570 chipset lacks support for not just "Bristol Ridge," but also first-generation Ryzen "Summit Ridge" and "Raven Ridge" processors.

We recommend that unless you literally possess a 3rd generation Ryzen processor, do not update the BIOS of your socket AM4 motherboard. You may risk losing features. Find out the latest version of BIOS that has the classic AGESA PinnaclePI 1.0.0.6 microcode, and use that instead.

Quote:Because the pre-launch run-up for AMD’s Ryzen 7 3000 family was… hectic, to say the least, a lot of nooks and corners had to be left unchecked, just to get the Navi and Ryzen reviews done on time. There was also a bit of difficulty in making sure that X470 and X570 motherboard cross-compatibility was properly maintained, and not a lot of time to spend screwing with either. For this reason, I elected to test the Ryzen 7 2700X on an older X470 motherboard and the Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X in the new X570 motherboard. In our review, I noted that AMD had fairly high idle power and that it wasn’t clear why.

We’ve done some additional investigating into this and can now clarify part of the problem: It’s the X570 chipset (as a whole) and certain X570 boards far more than others. If you put a Ryzen 7 3000 CPU in an X470 chipset, all of a sudden a whole lot of power efficiency suddenly appears. We’ve modified the power consumption graphs from our original review and tested an additional X570 motherboard.

Quote:For Destiny 2 fans who upgraded their rigs to Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, things are getting off to a rocky start. Those looking to jump right into the game and enjoy some exploration with their favorite Guardians were in for a rude awakening. It appears that the game has, for many, simply ceased loading for those running Ryzen 3000 setups.

Several players who took the plunge to power up their gaming setups are reporting that, following the upgrade, the game will no longer boot. According to Redditor Trinsikk, after clicking the "Play" button via Battle.net, the game supposedly begins to run, with the program showing up in the Task Manager, but it never starts. It appears to be using 5 to 10% of the CPU's power, but it's simply unresponsive.
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A few clues across social media and the numerous threads indicate that the problem isn't localized to AMD's X570 chipset, as it's happening across various builds, including the X570 and X470.

AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series just hit stores yesterday, and now only a day after release, it seems to be causing widespread headaches throughout the Destiny community. As of right now, however, it seems that Destiny 2 appears to be the only PC title adversely affected by the Ryzen 3000 configurations.

Quote:We were curious to see how well a cheap B350 motherboard could run the latest and greatest 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X and were pleasantly surprised that there was no smoke or sparks flying. Actually I'm impressed with how well this two-generation-old platform can run the newest processor — thank you AMD. Intel would have definitely charged us for a new chipset — twice.
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Now, the big question: should you buy a B350 motherboard for Ryzen 3000? I think it depends. If you plan on using a weaker CPU like Ryzen 5 3600, then by all means go for it. If you want to power more powerful processors then you should definitely keep an eye on VRM temperatures and ensure there's some airflow around them. You could probably also give the Ryzen 7 3700X a go, since it has a TDP of just 65 W, and beats the Core i9-9900K in various multi-threaded tests. If you insist on 3900X, we recommend that you at least pony up a few more Dollars toward one of the better motherboards based on this chipset, such as the Gaming Pro Carbon series from MSI, or Aorus Gaming 3 series by GIGABYTE, which offer X470-type CPU VRM solutions on motherboards priced around the $110-mark. You can pair such boards with a 3900X for endless number crunching.
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What's also important that "just gaming" won't stress your VRMs anywhere close to what highly-threaded rendering or scientific applications will do. Even in the thermally constrained water-cooled scenario, we couldn't record any performance differences in gaming or light apps. Even with our high-end RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, we didn't notice any gaming performance difference between the B350 and X570.

AMD has done a commendable job enabling people to save money by opting for older-generation motherboards to go with their latest processors. The AMD X570 is an expensive platform, but provides bleeding-edge connectivity. The only compelling argument for those buying a 500-series chipset motherboard is the M.2 NVMe SSD upgrade path. Perhaps when AMD releases the successor to B450 reportedly in 2020, you can have affordable motherboards with at least one M.2 slot that has PCIe gen 4.0 wiring. Until then, have at it with the B350, AMD wants you to be happy.

Quote:Our Monday story chronicled how MSI inadvertently erred in giving many of its AMD 400-series chipset motherboards 128 Mbit (16-megabyte) SPI flash ROM chips instead of larger 256 Mbit (32-megabyte) ones, which nearly jeopardized the company's "Zen 2" support deployment, forcing it to greatly thin its motherboard firmware feature-set, and break SATA RAID support on many of its boards. To be fair to MSI, the company may not have anticipated the AGESA microcode growing tremendously in size with its latest ComboAM4 1.0.0.3-series. We are now hearing from Polish tech publication PurePC that MSI has scrambled to remedy this by re-releasing many of its AMD 400-series chipset motherboards with larger 256 Mbit SPI flash ROM chips.

Quote:Some early AMD Ryzen 3000-series adopters have been experiencing random WHEA (Windows Hardware Error Architecture) errors that are crashing their systems with Nvidia GeForce gaming graphics cards. With the help of the affected users, Nvidia was able to collect enough information to replicate the error, and a hotfix should arrive soon.

Quote:Robert Hallock, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at AMD, has explained on Reddit (and copied below) that AMD pretty much squeezes all the performance out of every single Ryzen 3000-series processor, leaving little headroom for manual overclocking.

AMD has always focused on maximizing the performance from its processors for the end-user. According to Hallock, that's the primary reason why the chipmaker develops algorithms, such as Precision Boost 2, to automatically extract every megahertz of computing power from a processor. That way you're not forced to lean about overclocking to get the extra performance or worry about risking the warranty on your brand new processor.

From our own experience with the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X, we can confirm Hallock's statement, and a couple of motherboard manufacturers have told us the same thing. For example, our Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X samples operated with an all-core boost of 4.1 GHz and 4.125 GHz, respectively, during our testing. Our efforts to overclock the chips beyond 4.2 GHz were futile. Overclocking extraordinaire Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch only managed to break the 4.1 GHz barrier with aggressive voltages and exotic cooling, albeit with early silicon.
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Unless you win the silicon lottery and get an extraordinary Ryzen 3000-series chip, it looks like you're better off tweaking other aspects of your system than wasting time trying to overclock your processor's operating clocks. Hallock believes that overclocking your memory and the processor's Infinity Fabric interconnect yields more significant benefits.

Quote:The good news for those who own entry-level AM4 motherboards is that they can easily handle the new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors, from the R5 3600 all the way up to the Ryzen 9 3900X. We observed no issues with the exception of questionable memory support, though that wasn't new from 1st and 2nd-gen Ryzen parts.

The Ryzen 9 3900X works fine in its out of the box configuration, but don’t expect you’ll be able to go overclocking the 12-core CPU. Again, memory support on this particular B350 board was limited to DDR4-3200, but that’s all you need to get maximum performance anyway, assuming you’re using low latency memory. We don’t believe 3900X support is relevant right now, but in a few years' time when you can buy these CPUs second hand for what we’re guessing will be around $100-$200, then getting one and sticking it on a cheap B350 board will be a nice option.

As for higher-end B350 boards, we’ve yet to test any but those with a beefier VRM should be even better, assuming BIOS support is there. We’re also in the early days of support on older motherboards, so things could improve. No performance difference should be seen between AGESA 1.0.0.1 and 1.0.0.3, but memory compatibility could be improved, along with stability in general.

We are aware of the challenges AMD and its board partners face due to the promise of backwards-compatibility. For example, the storage capacity of the SPI flash EEPROM chip that stores the motherboard UEFI firmware isn’t big enough to fix the latest AGESA microcode, and this is a problem for a number of entry-level and mid-range boards that only use a 16MB EEPROM.

Asrock has made a lite-version of the BIOS that doesn’t feature any colors and has a very basic layout. The X570 motherboards have been upgraded to a 32MB EEPROM, no doubt to combat this issue moving forward, though they do drop support for first-gen parts anyway.

The bottom line is AMD's AM4 upgrade path is there to be taken advantage of, sooner or later, your choice.

Quote:EDIT, 7/12/2019, 7:55pm PT: AMD intends to lock out PCIe 4.0 support on previous-gen motherboards, but has not yet done so. We have amended the text below to accurately reflect the situation:

Chinese media Mydrivers reported this week Asus has listed its B450 and X470 motherboards for AMD CPUs that partially support the PCIe 4.0 standard.
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Edit: These BIOS revisions will likely be used widely to unlock PCIe 4.0 on these motherboards, but to retain that functionality, you will not be able to update to newer firmwares in the future that lock out support. That means you'll eventually lose out on the performance-boosting BIOS updates that AMD is known for.

Quote:AMD is cutting out the middlemen (kinda). The company used to limit direct-to-consumer sales to limited edition products, but that changed with the Radeon VII's introduction earlier this year, and now it's started to sell the Ryzen 9 3900X on its website as well. Or at least it's getting ready to--right now clicking the giant red "Add to Cart" button results in a message saying "the AMD product you are interested in purchasing is currently out of stock."

Quote:The problem with these fans, however, is that they can get somewhat uncomfortable in regards to the noise. In our ASRock X570 Taichi review, for example, we didn't find the fan to be very loud, but it did get "annoying," which is obviously not ideal (though thankfully that board had manual fan control). To mitigate these noise issues with X570 chipset fans, Gigabyte has pushed out a new BIOS update for all of its X570 boards with a chipset fan to add three new chipset fan profiles.
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It is good that Gigabyte is giving users the option to choose how noisy they want their motherboard to be, but it would be nice to have manual control like the X570 Taichi, at least as an additional option. Hopefully, the behavior of the X570 chipset fan will get improved over further BIOS updates from all motherboard vendors.

Quote:We came away impressed with the Ryzen 7 3800X, but motherboard firmwares are still raw, leaving us wondering if there is more performance lurking underneath the heat spreader. Particularly with the Precision Boost Overdrive and Auto Overclock features. If history is any indication, we could see that situation improve as AMD and motherboard vendors work out the kinks. For now, these results reflect our experiences with a chip purchased at retail and with publicly-available firmwares, but your mileage might vary.
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Value seekers who aren't afraid to press the Precision Boost Overdrive button and have sufficient cooling should look to the Ryzen 7 3700X for roughly equivalent performance to the 3800X, particularly if gaming factors heavily into the buying decision. That could save you $70, reinforcing our decision to give the Ryzen 7 3700X an Editor's Choice award.

Out of the box, the Ryzen 7 3800X is a better all-arounder than the Core i7-9700K and offers incrementally higher performance than its downstream counterpart. The bundled cooler reduces platform costs, and a wide array of motherboards with both X470 and X570 chipsets offers plenty of choices for builders.

Quote:AMD has once again refreshed its backward compatibility program and will offer customers who buy a Ryzen 3000 CPU without a compatible motherboard an APU they can use to update their systems. This program, which has been in place for several years now, is a solution to the perennial issue of CPU/APU upgrades not being backward compatible with older motherboards.

Quote:These revised motherboards feature "MAX" in the name, and come with 256 Mb (32-megabyte) SPI flash ROM chips, enabling MSI to combine AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3ab with ClickBIOS 5, and not compromising on any of the motherboard's BIOS-level feature-set. These motherboards also come with out-of-the-box support for all of the 3rd generation Ryzen processors launched so far, as indicated on the box. The boards also retain support for A-series "Bristol Ridge" and "Raven Ridge" Athlon APUs that had faced the axe with the latest BIOS updates. The B450 Tomahawk MAX and Mortar MAX are characterized by matte-black heatsinks replacing silver; while the B450-A PRO MAX has the "MAX" logo clearly printed on the VRM heatsink. Pricing of these boards are expected to be on par with the models they're replacing.

Quote:AMD does not sample the Ryzen 5 3600 processor. Instead, we went out and bought one because it is a highly interesting product. It is the most affordable Zen 2 processor currently available—kind of like the gateway drug to Ryzen 3000. Despite its competitive price, it offers six cores and twelve threads; the competition from Intel only gives you six cores—HyperThreading is reserved for the more expensive models. AMD successfully addressed the weaknesses in their Zen architecture with Zen 2, which helps improve IPC significantly. When averaged over all our application performance benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 3600 easily beats its main competitor, the Core i5-9600K, by a solid 20% margin. The Ryzen 5 3600 even goes neck to neck with the much more expensive Core i7-9700K and Core i7-8700K, which both are merely 2% faster, but roughly twice (!) as expensive. AMD's next-fastest, the $50 more expensive Ryzen 5 3600X, is only 2% faster, which makes it a bad alternative, more on that later. Based on our application benchmarks, I'd say the next real step up is the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X—there is no 3700 non-X, at least not yet, which means that step will cost you $130 more (or 65%) for a 13% application gain on average, which is probably not worth it for the average user.
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With a price of $200, the Ryzen 5 3600 is the price/performance king in its segment. It offers more application performance than anything comparable and is close enough in gaming. Pair that with the slightly lower platform cost on AMD than on Intel (don't bother with the expensive X570 motherboards), as well as the improved memory compatibility, and you'll have a winner on your hands. It's time for Intel to look at their product stack and adjust their pricing.

Quote:The AGESA 1.0.0.3ABA microcode was supposed to solve the specific issue of Destiny 2 not loading for Ryzen 3000-series owners and booting problems with certain Linux distributions. However, it looks like AMD might have jumped the gun on this one, and a bug slipped through.

Tan has commented on the Asus' ROG forums that the main reason for scrapping the AGESA 1.0.0.3ABA microcode was that it somehow downgraded the PCIe speed for the BXB-C from Gen 4 to Gen 2, which in return caused system instability. Now that AMD is aware of the problem, a fix will probably arrive sooner rather than later. In the meantime, motherboard manufacturers are on standby until AMD provides the updated microcode for validation and implementation in their firmware.

The Ryzen 3000-series processors hit the market a little over two weeks ago. Motherboard manufacturers are on a tight schedule to release new firmware for their existing AMD 300-and 400-series products. Bug detection requires thorough testing, precious time which motherboard vendors, unfortunately, don't have at the moment. As Tan has noted, sometimes it's a lose-lose situation. There's a public backlash if a company rolls out a firmware too quickly and overlooks a bug or if it takes too long to release one.

Quote:Despite AMD not supporting the PCIe 4.0 standard on pre-X570 motherboards, Biostar has gone ahead and activated the functionality on four of the brand's AMD 400-series motherboards.

Like Asus' case, Biostar can only offer the PCIe 4.0 speeds on the main PCIe x16 and M.2 slots. However, Biostar didn't specify whether the PCIe x16 slot will operate at x16 speed or limited to x8 with PCIe 4.0 enabled.

While the option to switch on PCIe 4.0 might be available now, AMD will eventually disable it in an AGESA microcode update. Basically, if you want PCIe 4.0, you'll be stuck on the same firmware for the rest of the motherboard's lifespan and miss out on any future features, performance enhancements or bug fixes. That's the price you'll pay if you pair a Ryzen 3000-series chip with a 400-series motherboard and expect PCIe 4.0 support.

Quote:The Ryzen 9 3900X remains the fastest processor in our bench even with SMT disabled, beating the Core i9-9900K across multi-threaded tests. It also beats an untouched Ryzen 7 3700X. It's settled then that 12 physical cores beat 8-core/16-thread. However, the lack of SMT shaves a significant amount of performance off of the Ryzen 9 3900X. This goes to show that AMD's implementation of SMT is a sincere engineering feat and has a tangible performance gain. "Zen" simply wouldn't be the same without SMT, and AMD has been kind/smart enough to provide the feature on all its processor models priced north of $140 rather than keeping it exclusive to those above $300.

That said, we notice another fascinating phenomenon. With SMT disabled, the IPC of the "Zen 2" core seems to go up by roughly 2 percent. This directly impacts performance of software not in need of too many cores, namely games. We theorize that this could be due to two distinct things happening with the processor. For one, with the SMT off its shoulders, power-management of the processor is left to spread its power budget and Precision Boost headroom across fewer logical processors, so each of the cores runs at higher boost frequencies, positively impacting per-core performance. Secondly, to a smaller extent, performance is also benefited by the on-core schedulers not having to juggle resources between two logical processors. We saw hints of this when testing the Core i7-9700K, an 8-core processor that lacks SMT, and comparing it to the 8-core/16-thread i9-9900K. Despite slightly lower clock speeds, the i7-9700K managed to match or slightly exceed the i9-9900K at gaming. There are 12 such "unburdened" cores on a Ryzen 9 3900X, and hence, we see a neat 2% performance boost across gaming tests.
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We leave this review pleasantly surprised. As PC enthusiasts ourselves who game a lot, and whose productivity workload isn't too multi-threaded, we can see the benefit of leaving SMT off on a Ryzen 9 3900X. Gaming performance gets an uplift that's as high as 9 percent if you're really lucky, and the multi-threaded performance of the resulting processor is still higher than 8-core/16-thread processors. 12 physical cores still do carry a lot of weight around. When we do get the itch to benchmark or deal with workloads that can scale across any number of cores, getting a massive 31 percent performance boost is just a flick of a switch away in Ryzen Master, pending reboot, of course.

Quote:Unfortunately, MSI didn't list the availability for the MAX motherboards. However, the motherboard manufacturer has already listed a few of them on its website, so we expect the motherboards to hit the market very soon. It's unclear if the MAX variants will be more expensive than their non-MAX counterparts.

Quote:Hardware leaker TUM_APISAK has unearthed a UserBenchmark result of an unidentified AMD 16-core processor. Judging by its specifications, the chip appears to be one of AMD's upcoming Threadripper 3000-series processors (codenamed Castle Peak).
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Su didn't reveal a concrete launch date for the new multi-core monsters. However, if AMD follows recent norms, it could release them next month. Looking back at Threadripper's history, we can recognize a fairly consistent pattern. AMD launched the first-and second-generation Threadripper processors in August 2017 and 2018, respectively. There's a good chance AMD could continue that trend.
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Although UserBenchmark isn't our preferred benchmark tool, some valuable data proves useful. The unknown part is seemingly up to 11% faster than the current Threadripper 2950X in single-core and quad-core tests. When it comes to multi-core workloads, the chip performs up to 18% faster than second-gen Threadripper.

On the other hand, the AMD 100-000000011-12's performance is on par with the Ryzen 9 3900X when it comes to single-core and quad-core workloads. As expected, the Threadripper sample beats the Ryzen 9 3900X by up to 35% in multi-core workloads.

Quote:Out of the box, the Ryzen 5 3600X is the best processor in its price range for gaming and productivity, marking a massive shift in the mid-range. At stock settings, the Ryzen 5 3600X regularly beat the more expensive Core i5-9600K in both categories, albeit by slim margins in gaming, reversing the long-held trend of Ryzen being best for productivity while Intel ruled the gaming roost. If you're into overclocking, the Intel processors are going to deliver more performance, but the majority of enthusiasts looking for a set-it-and-forget-it processor will find incredible value in the Ryzen 5 3600X.
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But there are two elephants in the room. Firstly, not all Ryzen models are hitting their rated boost clock rates. This boils down to several factors, including motherboard firmwares that will hopefully improve, and how enthusiasts measure clock rates. We measured clock rates at a 100ms granularity and found that, unlike what we've seen with the Ryzen 9 3900X, the Ryzen 5 3600X does achieve its rated clock speeds. There are a few caveats associated with that, which we'll dive into deeper in a follow-up piece.

Overclocking performance is also another concern for enthusiasts. The previous-gen Ryzen models were never known for their overclocking prowess, but more often than not, you could eke out some decent performance gains via manual tuning. Outside of a few edge use-cases, those days are over. Now it's best to stick with AMD's automated PBO overclocking feature, and you shouldn't expect massive gains. It seems that AMD is extracting the best performance it can from the 7nm process at stock clocks, so there is precious little overhead left to exploit. Intel does offer higher overclocking capability, and that will continue to be attractive to enthusiasts chasing that last frame per second in their favorite titles.
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Our only hesitation with recommending the 3600X comes from competition within AMD's own stable. After overclocking, AMD's non-X models, like the Ryzen 5 3600, often offer the same level of performance as their more-expensive counterparts. That means the 3600 looks like a great chip (from afar) that will offer similar performance at a $50 savings. We'll have that part in for testing soon.

With all of Ryzen 5 3600X's advantages, aside from higher overclocking ceilings, there are very few reasons to buy a competing Intel processor in this price range. The Ryzen 5 3600X has stolen the mid-range crown from Intel.

Quote:A recent EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) listing has revealed a multitude of unannounced third-generation Ryzen desktop processors, which includes the Ryzen 9 3900, Ryzen 7 3700, Ryzen 5 3500 and three other Ryzen 3000-series Pro chips. As with all preliminary listings, these could merely be placeholders that reflect certain models that AMD may or may not bring to market.

Quote:Though it's been known for some time now that AMD is making strides in some regions such as Germany, data from other regions has been slow to accumulate. Recently, data for both direct CPU sales (like ordering a CPU from Amazon) and pre-builts became available via BCN, a Japanese company that tracks market share trends in Japan.

The results are pretty telling: In Japan, AMD has 68.6% of direct CPU sales this July and 14.7% in pre-builts in June. The Ryzen 3000 processors seem to have further accelerated AMD's pace because its direct CPU sales made up only 46.7% last June.
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AMD's sales aren't as pronounced when it comes to pre-built PCs, but considering they made up just 2% last January and are now up to 14.7%, the gains are impressive. It'll be interesting to see what the landscape will look like for pre-builts once the July data is available; if Ryzen 3000 has the same impact on pre-builts as it did to direct CPU sales, AMD might gain on Intel very quickly.

Quote:AMD fixed a bug that caused "Destiny 2" to be unplayable on 3rd generation Ryzen processors, through updated chipset drivers.
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Hallock comments that this is a "workaround" to help "get you into the game." It looks like a more permanent solution to the bug still lies in updating the microcode, once AMD figures out what went wrong with 1.0.0.3ABA.

Quote:AMD today addressed multiple issues with its 3rd generation Ryzen processors through a highly-recommended update to its Chipset Driver software.
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AMD is currently testing and validating AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3ABB and will push it to motherboard manufacturers to encapsulate into their BIOS updates in the coming weeks.

Quote:Several weeks after AMD launched its new Ryzen 7 3700X, 3800X, and 3900X, we have some indication of why the company took this step. The Ryzen 7 3700X appears to be broadly in-market, but the Ryzen 7 3800X and particularly the 3900X are scarce. Prices on the 3900X have spiked on eBay, up to $800 or more in some cases. Don’t pay spiking eBay prices.
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So why isn’t this a paper launch? Two reasons: First, a review of sites like NowInStock.net shows that Ryzen 9 3900X’s are available — just not for very long when they show up in stock.

The second factor is time. We historically give companies more than just three weeks to demonstrate product availability. I took both AMD and Nvidia to task back in 2016 for their mutual failure to bring 14/16nm GPUs to-market in sufficient quantities to avoid the appearance of a paper launch. In that instance, however, far more time had passed.

Quote:Tom’s Hardware has done a significant deep-dive into this issue and came away with a number of key findings. In the past, AMD CPUs were capable of hitting their top-rated boost frequencies on any CPU cores. Intel chips are designed similarly. With Ryzen 3000, apparently only up to one core needs to be capable of hitting its maximum or near-maximum boost frequency. The scheduler updates baked into Windows 10 were said to speed power state transitions (which they do), but they also assign workloads specifically to the fastest cores capable of hitting a given clock.

These findings may explain why all-core overclocking headroom on these new Ryzen 7 processors is so low. On the Ryzen 7 3600X, only one CPU core proved capable of hitting 4.35GHz, for example, with other cores on the same chip boosting to 75-100MHz lower. AMD has not released exact specs for what frequencies its cores need to be able to hit to satisfy its own internal metrics for launch, which means we don’t really “know” which frequencies these CPU cores will operate at. This is definitely a change from previous parts, where all cores could be more-or-less assumed to be capable of hitting the same boost frequencies, and it may have implications for overclockers — but it doesn’t really change my opinion on AMD’s 7nm Ryzen CPUs. If anything, I suspect it’s a harbinger of where the industry is headed in the future.
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According to AMD, roughly 25 percent of the performance improvements of the past decade have come from better compilers and improved power management. That percentage will likely be even larger 10 years from now. Power consumption at both idle and load is now the largest enemy of improved silicon performance, and variability in silicon process is a major cause of power consumption. Improving performance in the future is going to rely on different tools than the ones we’ve used for the past few decades, and one of the likely consequences of that push is the end of overclocking. Manufacturers can’t afford to leave 10, 20, 30 percent performance margins on the table any longer. Those margins represent a significant percentage of the total improvements they can offer.

Quote:According to VideoCardz'es sources at ASUS, they have received confirmation that ASUS is working on new motherboards for AMD's unannounced chipset offerings, X590 and possibly even X599. In ASUS'es internal documentation two motherboards are appearing with X590 name, PRIME X590-PRO and ROG STRIX X590-E.

Quote:Looking at our benchmark results, we can confirm definite performance improvements with the new AMD chipset drivers across the board. Especially low-threaded applications benefit in a significant way, some posting several percent improvements, which is big—Intel sold us such gains wrapped up in a new processor generation. What's slightly surprising is that heavily-threaded applications do lose a little bit of performance, especially rendering seems affected. Overall, I'd say those results are definitely favorable. Trading a small loss in multi-threaded performance for better low-threaded performance certainly seems worth it to me—I guess the people complaining on social media about losing 100 points in Cinebench nT and declaring this update a disaster might disagree with me.
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Overall, to gain performance improvements of any kind through a "chipset" driver update is a pleasant surprise, and it's good to see AMD delivering lifecycle-quality updates mere weeks into the product launch, especially when it's troubleshooting not one, but two distinct product lines—Ryzen and Radeon. If you have one of these processors, we highly recommend you update your drivers.

Quote:Gigabyte releases new firmware with AMD's revised AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB microcode for the brand's AMD 300-and 400-series motherboards. The latest microcode addresses a couple of issues with Ryzen 3000-series processors, but it also removes PCIe 4.0 functionality.
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Either the AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB microcode is the culprit here, or Gigabyte disabled PCIe 4.0 functionality out of its own free will. For now, it's impossible to tell because Gigabyte is the only motherboard manufacturer to deploy new firmware with the updated microcode. Once other vendors begin releasing new firmwares for their products, we'll be able to find out whether it was AMD or Gigabyte that pulled the trigger.

Quote:Despite X570 being on the market for about a month now, it's just now come to our attention that one of ASRock's X570 ITX motherboards actually doesn't support AMD stock coolers. That's because it uses Intel's current LGA 1151 mounting mechanism instead of the AM4 mounting mechanism that, to our knowledge, every single other AM4 motherboard uses instead. The X570 Phantom Gaming motherboard advertises its lack of AM4 support on its "special design that uses Intel LGA 115X mounting holes."
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Although it's been two years since Ryzen came out and AMD brought competition back, AMD still doesn't quite have the presence Intel has on the motherboard side (though this is clearly changing), and this is especially the case on niche platforms like mini-ITX. Many of the mini-ITX-oriented coolers on the market only support Intel's current mounting mechanism, so if you want a really good low-profile cooler for your Ryzen 3000 CPU, your options are limited on AM4 sockets. By switching to LGA 1151 (which is also compatible with older coolers for older sockets), ASRock has improved the cooler availability for these CPUs.

Quote:That’s a very strong launch month for AMD, considering that the company didn’t even go on-sale until 7/7. While AMD’s market share grew 11 percentage points, it’s the increase in total processor shipments that reflects strong demand for the new parts. In June, Mindfactory sold ~9000 – 9500 AMD CPUs and ~4000 – 4500 Intel chips. In July, AMD appears to have sold ~18,500 CPUs and just shy of 5000 Intel CPUs. It looks as though Intel demand was driven by the 9900K, 9700K, and 9600K, implying that at least some Intel fans delayed purchases to see if AMD would bring something to the table that they wanted to purchase, then pulled the trigger on upgrades of their own. A great many shoppers, however, were clearly looking for something from Team Red. It’s good to see the 3900X on this list — the chip may be difficult to find right now, but this is evidence that parts are making it to market.
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Overall, the data suggests Ryzen is selling very well. Intel continues to have a bulwark with gamers who want single-threaded top-end gaming performance above all other options, but third-generation Ryzen closed the gap between both companies in that area as well.

Quote:AMD's latest AGESA update, which is being seeded to motherboard manufacturers, culls efforts to implement support for PCIe 4.0 in boards not carrying the latest X570 chipset. Some motherboard manufacturers had enabled support for the new standard on existing B450 and X470 motherboards - some with limited support, as was the case on some of ASUS' motherboards, others with full support. However, these efforts from motherboard manufacturers went against AMD's strategy with their X570 platform - all in all, these "rogue additions" reduced one additional feature of new X570 motherboards over their older counterparts.

Quote:The "Zen 3" microarchitecture is designed for the next big process technology change within 7 nm, EUV (extreme ultraviolet), which allows significant increases in transistor densities, and could facilitate big improvements in energy-efficiency that could be leveraged to increase clock-speeds and performance. It could also feature new ISA instruction-sets. With "Zen 3" passing design phase, AMD will work on prototyping and testing it. The first "Zen 3" products could debut in 2020. "Zen 4" is being designed for a different era.


The "Zen 4" architecture is being designed for a 2021 market debut, and will come out at a time when the 7 nm process will have matured and attained high enough volumes at TSMC for AMD to either build bigger dies (more cores per chiplet), or leverage the even more advanced 6 nm EUV node. The maturity and volumes of these sub-10 nm nodes could change the economics of the MCM approach AMD is undertaking for its EPYC processors.

Quote:AMD over the weekend updated the product-pages of its Ryzen processors on the company website to be very specific about what they mean by "Max Boost Clocks," that are advertised almost as extensively as the processor's main nominal clock-speeds. AMD describes it has "the maximum single-core frequency at which the processor is capable of operating under nominal conditions." We read into this as the highest boost-clock given to one of the cores on the processor.

Quote:The Ryzen 5 3500 first appeared last month in a EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) listing with a bunch of other unannounced Ryzen 3000-series (codename Matisse) processors. TUM_APISAK has shed some light on the chip's specifications. The Ryzen 5 3500 is reportedly equipped with six cores and six threads, making it the first Ryzen 3000-series part to arrive without SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). According to the leak, this AMD hexa-core processor has a 3.6 GHz base clock and 4.1 GHz boost clock. The previous EEC listing has the Ryzen 5 3500 with a 65W TDP (thermal design power).

Quote:Here Intel describes that AMD wins in synthetic workloads, while its CPUs win in a real world usage scenarios for applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and more. While they claim to posses better overall productivity performance, Intel also claims few other trophies in areas like gaming, where Core i7-9700K "is on par or better" than AMD Ryzen 9 3900X across many games tested.

In our own testing, we found the claim about gaming performance to be true where Intel's Core i7-9700K did perform better than Ryzen 9 3900X. However when it comes to overall performance results that also includes many other tasks besides gaming, like productivity and science, the case is not proven.

Quote:It was to be expected that the Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X would be in high demand; the former is $70 cheaper than the 3800X for about the same performance, and the latter is the world's first mainstream 12-core CPU that also happens to be AMD's best gaming CPU (though not by a massive margin). What is unexpected is the ongoing shortage with the 3700X and 3900X that has not entirely gone away since July 7th. These new CPUs have only been available in small quantities since launch and have been selling out almost immediately, leading to price gouging on eBay.
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Other Ryzen SKUs, however, seem to have escaped these supply issues, most notably the 3800X, which is basically the same as the 3700X but binned a little better and $70 more. Perhaps AMD has intentionally constrained the supply of the 3700X to encourage impatient people to just buy the 3800X. On the other hand, the Ryzen 5 3600 doesn't seem to have ever gone out of stock (which would force buyers to choose the 3600X), so perhaps AMD's supply issues are entirely down to unprecedented demand.

Quote:Overclocker and hardware reviewer De8auer, widely known for his Intel delidding tools and overclocking videos, has released the results of a survey he conducted late last month concerning Ryzen 3000's ability to reach its advertised boost clocks. Only 5.6% of respondents reported that their Ryzen 9 3900X is reaching its rated boost speed. The results are somewhat better with other SKUs, but still indicate that the majority of Ryzen 3000 series processors are not hitting their rated boost speeds.

Users and reviewers alike have been questioning whether or not AMD's new CPUs are always able to boost to the advertised clock speeds. We recently published an analysis on the 3600X detailing Ryzen 3000's new boosting behavior, and AMD confirmed that only one core on any given CPU is guaranteed to hit the rated boost clock. However, according to the survey, more users aren't even reaching the advertised frequency on any core.

De8auer's survey obtained the performance data of 2,700 systems from users who were asked to run the single threaded benchmark on Cinebench R15 and record the maximum clock speed using HWInfo (which was recommended by AMD). Most users reported that they were not able to hit the advertised boost clock, though many were within 25 MHz.

At AMD's best, about half of Ryzen 5 3600 users reported their CPU was boosting correctly, and at worst, only 5.6% of Ryzen 9 3900X users reported that their CPU was boosting correctly. Most users were within 100 MHz of the advertised boost clock, but there was still a significant number who were more than 100 MHz away.
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He does admit that users who weren't getting the rated boost clocks would be more likely to submit their result than users who had no issues, something which could skew results, and that he could not ensure whether or not users applied the Windows 10 update that ensures the Windows scheduler would be using the fastest core for single-threaded workloads.

On the other hand, though, the data more or less demonstrates that most users are not getting the experience promised by AMD and De8auer says if a specific Windows version or something is required to achieve the rated boost, AMD should make that clear to its users.
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Despite the controversy over AMD's advertised boost clocks, De8auer still says he recommends all the Ryzen 3000 CPUs; however, he also states that the results in his survey were much worse than he expected and is worried about whether or not AMD can solve this issue in a timely manner. He concludes his findings wondering why AMD would advertise these clock speeds.
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AMD hasn't yet made a statement on whether or not this is the intended behavior of Ryzen 3000 CPUs, or if there is a fix in the works.

Quote:AMD has now issued a statement regarding these lower than expected clock frequencies on Zen 2 processors, and it looks like there is indeed an underlying BIOS issue that's responsible. Let's hope that this new firmware gets released quickly and is able to restore faith in AMD's otherwise excellent track-record.

Quote:AMD is pleased with the strong momentum of 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processors in the PC enthusiast and gaming communities. We closely monitor community feedback on our products and understand that some 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen users are reporting boost clock speeds below the expected processor boost frequency. While processor boost frequency is dependent on many variables including workload, system design, and cooling solution, we have closely reviewed the feedback from our customers and have identified an issue in our firmware that reduces boost frequency in some situations. We are in the process of preparing a BIOS update for our motherboard partners that addresses that issue and includes additional boost performance optimizations. We will provide an update on September 10 to the community regarding the availability of the BIOS.

Quote:Was that the right call? I’m not sure. This is a situation where I genuinely see both sides of the issue. The Ryzen 3000 family delivers excellent performance. But even after allowing for variation caused by Windows version, driver updates, or UEFI issues on the part of the manufacturer, we don’t see as many AMD CPUs hitting their maximum boost clocks as we would expect, and the higher-end CPUs with higher boost clocks have more issues than lower-end chips with lower clocks. AMD’s claims of getting more frequency out of TSMC 7nm as compared with GF 12/14nm seem a bit suspect at this point. The company absolutely delivered the performance gains we wanted, and the power improvements on the X470 chipset are also very good, but the clocking situation was not detailed the way it should have been at launch.

There are rumors that AMD supposedly changed boost behavior with recent AGESA versions. Asus employee Shamino wrote:
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I have no specific knowledge of this situation, but this would surprise me. First, reliability models are typically hammered out long before production. Companies don’t make major changes post-launch save in exceptional circumstances, because there is no way to ensure that the updated firmware will reach the products that it needs to reach. When this happens, it’s major news. Remember when AMD had a TLB bug in Phenom? Second, AMD’s use of Adaptive Frequency and Voltage Scaling is specifically designed to adjust the CPU voltage internally to ensure clock targets are hit, limiting the impact of variability and keeping the CPU inside the sweet spot for clock.

I’m not saying that AMD would never make an adjustment to AGESA that impacted clocking. But the idea that the company discovered a critical reliability issue that required it to make a subtle change that reduced clock by a mere handful of MHz in order to protect long-term reliability doesn’t immediately square with my understanding of how CPUs are designed, binned and tested. We have reached out to AMD for additional information.

I’m still confident and comfortable recommending the Ryzen 3000 family because I’ve spent a significant amount of time with these chips and seen how fast they are. But AMD’s “up to” boost clocks are also more tenuous than we initially knew. It doesn’t change our expectation of the part’s overall performance, but the company appears to have decided to interpret “up to” differently this cycle than in previous product launches. That shift should have been communicated. Going forward, we will examine both Intel and AMD clock behavior more closely as a component of our review coverage.