Custom PC - UK (2021-05)

There are a few ways to overclock your PC,
especially when it comes to the CPU, but we’ll
be covering the easiest and quickest ways
to get more performance, especially as heat
is far less of an issue with a water-cooled
PC. To start with, you’ll need a copy of MSI
Afterburner (guru3D.com) and AMD Ryzen
Master (amd.com). You’ll also need a copy
of Prime95 (mersenne.org).
Starting with the latter plus AMD Ryzen
Master, run the smallestFFT test in Prime95
with all AVX options disabled and monitor
the temperature through Ryzen Master. Your
CPU should be well below 80°C to give you
headroom for overclocking. Our Ryzen 9
5900X stayed below 65°C after five minutes
of this test, giving us plenty of space for
an overclock.
We’re tending to move away from raw
manual overclocks with Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs

for the simple reason that their all-core boost

speeds aren’t usually that much behind what

the CPU can achieve by itself, but you lose

the lightly threaded boost frequencies too.

However, AMD has Precision Boost

Overdrive and Automatic Overclocking to

help bridge the gap and this is what we’ll

be using here. It has a new curve optimiser

to help reduce power and thermals, but

we found it to be unstable and required

significant tweaking, so for now we’re sticking

to the tried and tested method. You may want

to investigate this further.

Head into the BIOS, and make sure you’ve

enabled the XMP profile. This will set the

correct memory speed and timings. If you’re

using a riser cable, you’ll need to switch the

PCI-E primary slot to Gen 3 mode if it’s a

PCI-E 3 cable – this can cause stability issues.

Do this as soon as you power on your PC from

the get-go, even before you install Windows.

After you’ve done that, head to the

Advanced section and find the options

for AMD overclocking. Here you’ll see the

Precision Boost Overdrive options.

You’ll want to allow your motherboard to

control the power limits, but set a 10x scalar

and 2000MHz boost clock override. This

will provide a bump to single and multi-

threaded workloads.

Apply your settings and then go back to

Windows and perform another stress test.

Here, our CPU temperature hit 83°C after

Ensure the XMP profile is enabled in the BIOS, and
switch to PCI-E Gen 3 mode if you’re using a PCI-E
3 riser cable

It’s now easier to overclock using Precision Boost

than dialling in the settings manually

MSI Afterburner is our GPU overclocking tool of choice – we increased the core clock by 100MHz

and memory by 800MHz

PERFORMANCE

AND OVERCLOCKING

FEATURE / CUSTOMISATION