When you fire up your PC, head into the EFI
(press Del) and start by configuring your
memory. Select the XMP profile to set your
memory to the correct speed, timings and
voltage. In this case, it’s 3466MHz and 1.35V.
Next, head to the fan control section. We
need to fine-tune the rear fan, which is
connected to your CPU fan header. We’ve
reduced the fan curve, so it only reaches full
speed when the CPU hits 100°C. Below this
temperature, the fan runs at around 50 per
cent speed, but you can fine-tune the speed
to suit your needs.
The easiest way to overclock your graphics
card is to use OC Scanner – an automatic
overclocking tool that’s included with
several overclocking utilities, including MSI
Afterburner. Click on the small vertical line
symbol next to the core clock bar and follow
through to OC Scanner. Click on Scan and the
software will test your graphics card and find
stable overclocked settings. Alternatively,
you can apply a manual overclock. We added
150MHz to the GPU core and set 500MHz in
the memory frequency bar.
We’ve decided not to overclock our Ryzen
9 3900X for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you
lose its peak 4.6GHz boost speed and, with
the all-cover overclock of our chip maxing
out at 4.3GHz, that’s quite a climb down for
gaming performance. The CPU will also run
hotter when overclocked, and while you do
gain multi-threaded performance, you lose
all-round performance, especially in lightly
threaded workloads.
However, if multi-threaded performance
is your top priority, start by overclocking to
4.3GHz and apply a vcore of 1.425V. Then
use Prime95 without AVX enabled to stress-
test your system for ten minutes, keeping a
careful eye on temperatures. You can then
start to reduce the voltage in 0.01V steps until
you encounter stability issues, then raise it
two notches to keep your system stable.Fine-tune the rear fan in the EFI’s fan control sectionFEATURE / CUSTOMISATION
SETUP AND
OVERCLOCKING
IF MULTI-THREADED
PERFORMANCE IS YOUR
TOP PRIORITY, START BY
OVERCLOCKING TO 4.3GHZ