AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with Corsair H60 Overclocking & Undervolting

Introduction and Test Setup

| Source: OC3D Price: Author: Tom Logan

Introduction

It is common to find guides to overclocking processors, and indeed pre-overclocked system builds, that rely heavily upon the old ethos of sticking as many volts into the processor as it and your cooling can handle, and stopping when everything is stable.

That might have been the methodology when we were all doing our best with the E8400, but the times have changed and the high core counts on modern enthusiast level processors require a more measured approach. Thankfully the major change in the marketplace towards more efficient products has reaped enormous benefits for those of us who perhaps have a more limited budget for cooling and don't want a system that sucks so much wattage we need our own windfarm in the garden to cope with it.

The 2nd Generation of Ryzen CPUs is a particularly good example of this ethos. The original Ryzen was very fast but had a few rough edges when it came to power draw and thermals, but in the time between the first Zen architecture launch and this years one saw the AMD engineers working very hard to fine tune the Ryzen range. Those efforts weren't in vain as the 2nd Generation is now a match for most things on the market.

If you've been fortunate enough to obtain one of these 2nd Generation processors and want to extract the maximum from it, read on and discover how to make your Ryzen 7 2700X both faster but also more efficient.

Test Setup

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

Corsair H60

ASUS Prime X470-Pro

Corsair LPX 2666MHz

Corsair LPX 3200MHz

Corsair MP500 M.2

nVidia GTX 980

Corsair HX1000i

When you get your new AMD Ryzen 7 2700X out of the box and let the motherboard control things you get this here. 4.1 GHz at 1.41v VCore. Like a lot of modern processors the majority of the automatic overclocking, turbo boosting, is done on one or two cores rather than across all the cores. Naturally if you've got 8 cores available to you then you want to extract the maximum from them. However, doing so doesn't require a massive investment in cooling nor some monstrous core voltages and subsequent power draw and heat loading.

So sure are we that we can take a Ryzen 7 2700X and turn it from a processor that uses 1.4v to get 4 GHz on a couple of cores into one that is run on lower voltages but with 4 GHz across all eight cores that we have dispensed with our usual Corsair H100i AIO and instead are using the humblest model in the wide Corsair range, the H60. How did we get on? Read on.

1 - Introduction and Test Setup 2 - Corsair H60 3 - Regular Overclocking Methodology 4 - Undervolting Too Far 5 - Final Overclock and Boost 6 - Power Benefits 7 - Temperatures and Wrap Up «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next»

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