Recently, we saw a bunch of Geekbench benchmarks of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors where the chips were able to boost past their rated boost frequency. The Ryzen 9 5950X which has a max boost frequency of 4.9GHz reached 5.04GHz while the 5900X was pegged at 4.94GHz, up from its marketed boost of 4.8GHz. As per @MebiuW, these higher boost clocks are due to use of Precision Boost Overdrive.
With the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, PBO didn’t really do much even with proper cooling. In multi-threaded, it marginally improved performance by pushing the all-core boost by a notch.
However, it seems that with Zen 3, the algorithm has been updated to push the general single-core boost clock up as well, under certain conditions, of course. This makes it somewhat similar to Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost which increases the boost clock by 200-300MHz if the CPU temperature is within safe limits.
We haven’t been able to confirm this as of now, but we’ll definitely include a review of PBO and AutoOverclock with the new Ryzen 5000 processors on November 5th.
