Newly upgraded to 2700x - some questions

[lilrayray69]

Hey all, recently upgraded from a 4690k to the 2700x. Got the MSI X470 Pro Carbon and 16GB DDR3200 RAM with it. Using my prior GTX 1080 and a monitor that's 1440p/144hz if that matters.
First thing I'm noticing is the CPU never hits the advertised 4.3ghz max turbo boost - the highest I've seen it is about 4150mhz even in benchmarks or prime95. In gaming I notice very slight hitching at times and while the overall performance is better than my 4690k was it's not as much a difference as I thought. Using the Ryzen Master software I notice the EDC goes to 100% very easily, even under slight load. I am not totally sure what EDC is. This X470 board had 2 8 pin power ports for the CPU, my PSU only has 1 such connector so I'm wondering if it needs a PSU with 2 of those for adequate power?
I've read some about Precision Boost and XFR and wonder is that something I need to manually enable? I looked around in the BIOS but didn't see any options for them.
The CPU fan also is significantly louder, it's the same heatsink I used prior it just seems to constantly have it a higher RPM - it will cycle up/down a bit even when idling. I checked the Windows settings and I'm set to the Balanced power option (not the "AMD Ryzen Balanced" option).

I haven't had an AMD CPU in a long time, never messed with a Ryzen prior to this so any advice/input is helpful. Thanks

 

[scannall]

Hey all, recently upgraded from a 4690k to the 2700x. Got the MSI X470 Pro Carbon and 16GB DDR3200 RAM with it. Using my prior GTX 1080 and a monitor that's 1440p/144hz if that matters.
First thing I'm noticing is the CPU never hits the advertised 4.3ghz max turbo boost - the highest I've seen it is about 4150mhz even in benchmarks or prime95. In gaming I notice very slight hitching at times and while the overall performance is better than my 4690k was it's not as much a difference as I thought. Using the Ryzen Master software I notice the EDC goes to 100% very easily, even under slight load. I am not totally sure what EDC is. This X470 board had 2 8 pin power ports for the CPU, my PSU only has 1 such connector so I'm wondering if it needs a PSU with 2 of those for adequate power?
I've read some about Precision Boost and XFR and wonder is that something I need to manually enable? I looked around in the BIOS but didn't see any options for them.
The CPU fan also is significantly louder, it's the same heatsink I used prior it just seems to constantly have it a higher RPM - it will cycle up/down a bit even when idling. I checked the Windows settings and I'm set to the Balanced power option (not the "AMD Ryzen Balanced" option).

I haven't had an AMD CPU in a long time, never messed with a Ryzen prior to this so any advice/input is helpful. Thanks

I can't speak to the MSI motherboard. But you may want to check that your heat sink is properly installed. I had a similar problem with my 2600X, and getting the heat sink down properly took care of the problem. After re-seating the heat sink I get 4.2 on all cores, with a rare bump to 4.3 or 4.4 on one core. With a modern OS running hundreds of threads it isn't going to happen all that often.

If you can't find PBO in your bios, you can enable it in the Ryzen Master program btw.

The stock cooler that comes with it is quite good btw. I'm using the stock cooler on my 2600X, and the 2700X gets a better one. It never spins fast enough that I actually hear it, even when stress testing.

 

[CuriousMike]

the CPU never hits the advertised 4.3ghz max turbo boost - the highest I've seen it is about 4150mhz

This confused me with my R7 1700 - The 4.3ghz is the max boost for a single core.
If all cores are being used, your max boost will be lower than 4.3ghz.

 

[CuriousMike]

Tom's has a pretty good chart depicting how the frequency changes based on thread count.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-7-2700-2700x-review,5606.html

 

[lilrayray69]

Yeah I may have to re-seat the heatsink...I did see Cool&Quiet was disabled in the BIOS, so I set it to on and now the CPU is downclocking as it should, still somewhat loud but it's not terrible. It's not getting hot, max of 58C in prime95 so I'm not sure if the seating is an issue or not.
Ah I see PBO in the Ryzen Master...may try it out.

Thanks for the info on the boost clock, that makes sense. Single cores are going up as high as 4300mhz just not all the cores simultaneously.

 

[happy medium]

4670 to a 2700?
That's not an upgrade, sidegrade at best. When both overclocked the 4670 might even be faster.

Edit see now its a 4670, still for games thats a small upgrade.
Should have just grabbed a 4970 for cheap.

 

[lilrayray69]

4670 to a 2700?
That's not an upgrade, sidegrade at best. When both overclocked the 4670 might even be faster.

Edit see now its a 4670, still for games thats a small upgrade.
Should have just grabbed a 4970 for cheap.

Yeah, I know. My 4690k was struggling after being overclocked for a couple years, was interested in the Ryzen so switched to it. Couldn't find a 4970k for sale actually.

 

[scannall]

The 2700X is a solid product. Sounds like you need to fiddle with it a bit to be happy, but that's OK. As far as overclocking goes, I'd just stick to enabling PBO and call it a day. Manual might get better MT benchmarks by a little. But if you are a gamer, the XFR is a better choice.

 

[lilrayray69]

The 2700X is a solid product. Sounds like you need to fiddle with it a bit to be happy, but that's OK. As far as overclocking goes, I'd just stick to enabling PBO and call it a day. Manual might get better MT benchmarks by a little. But if you are a gamer, the XFR is a better choice.

Yeah the 2700x definitely seems better for multitasking so far, my OC'd 4690k was struggling to game+stream. Is XFR it's auto clock boost or something that must be manually enabled?

 

[scannall]

Yeah the 2700x definitely seems better for multitasking so far, my OC'd 4690k was struggling to game+stream. Is XFR it's auto clock boost or something that must be manually enabled?

If you enable PBO, it will drop the voltage cap and clock as high as your cooling allows. Just be aware that enabling PBO voids your warranty, which shouldn't be a surprise. All it really does is remove the voltage caps,and keeps the thermal caps in place. So it should be safe. But unless you have some super cooling I'd just leave it at stock. The process has a pretty hard wall at just over 4 Ghz, so allowing more voltage won't gain a lot really. Just make things noisier and hotter for minimal gain.

 

[Elfear]

Picked up a 2700X a few months ago and it's been an excellent CPU. Enabled PBO and I see 4.35Ghz most of the time on lightly-threaded apps. I've been a pretty avid overclocker for a lot of years but XFR2 and PBO have convinced me to let the motherboard and chip work their magic instead of fiddling with settings for minimal gains.

 

[Ceramicdragon]

Would upgrading from a i5 2500K 4.4 Ghz to this be worth it or more of a lateral move?

 

[UsandThem]

Would upgrading from a i5 2500K 4.4 Ghz to this be worth it or more of a lateral move?

No. With that CPU, and depending on what you do with your PC, there would be a decent upgrade there.

Although, if I were wanting to upgrade from that CPU, I would definitely wait for Zen 2 in the spring. If the rumors are even somewhat accurate, that is going to be a nice CPU. However, if I caught a killer deal on a 2700X, I could see going that route if I had the upgrade bug as well.

 

[epsilon84]

Would upgrading from a i5 2500K 4.4 Ghz to this be worth it or more of a lateral move?

Most definitely worth the upgrade, especially for productivity. You're looking at 2.5x to 3.0x the MT performance, so highly threaded apps will benefit greatly.

For gaming, it depends on the title. Older games or ones that depend more on single threaded performance won't see much of an upgrade. More modern titles that can take advantage of the extra cores and threads will run much better on the 2700X.

 

[chrisjames61]

Would upgrading from a i5 2500K 4.4 Ghz to this be worth it or more of a lateral move?

The upgrade would be more than "decent".

 

[dmoney1980]

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but what about a 3930k upgrade to a Ryzen 2x? I game at 4k BTW

 

[Dasa2]

4k has no impact on CPU performance vs 720p just the GPU
Test the games you play at 720p and 4k if you find they run fine at 720p then a CPU upgrade wont help only GPU.

Even if you find you are CPU limited once overclocked the 3930K will perform so close to 2700X you wouldn't notice the difference in any games that use 6 cores or less.
At stock 2700X would be ~25% faster.

 

[scannall]

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but what about a 3930k upgrade to a Ryzen 2x? I game at 4k BTW

At 4K it wouldn't make a difference.

 

[KentState]

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but what about a 3930k upgrade to a Ryzen 2x? I game at 4k BTW

What graphics card?

 

[happy medium]

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but what about a 3930k upgrade to a Ryzen 2x? I game at 4k BTW

At 4k the best upgrade for you is a graphics card upgrade.
A proper 4k card would be a gtx1080ti ,rtx2080, or rtx2080ti.

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

I just did a similar upgrade, but from a slightly older processor.

Here are a couple things I noticed:
1. EDC is the processor current limit. In my setup, that seems to be the first thing that goes to 100% (well, 100% of 140A, with a limit of 168A).
2. Setting the power profile to balanced with a minimum processor limit of 5% will allow the CPU to throttle down when under minimal load. This will keep the EDC low as well. You need to drill down through several "advanced" or "alternate" setting pages to get to the processor power settings.
3. If you use the performance profile, you can manually modify the minimum power state to something lower than the default value of 100%, (it is when the minimum CPU limit is set at 100% that the EDC stays high, even when the CPU isn't being pushed).

Not sure if it really matters having the EDC high all the time, but I wanted to allow the CPU to drop in frequency and power consumption when doing simple tasks, so for me it made sense to set the minimum processor value to something pretty low, like 5%.

My CPU will top out at 4050 MHz when running all cores during the Ryzen Master stress test. It is pretty rare for it to use only a single core, since there always seem to be background tasks going on other cores, so maybe that is part of what prevents you from getting a high single core frequency. In the all core test, the EDC seems to be the limiting factor because I did a test with the limit raised to 150A and the all core max frequency went to 4100 MHz. I'm using the Asrock Mini-ITX B450 Motherboard, and I know the VRM setup on mini-ITX boards are pretty constrained due to packaging limitations, so without knowing what the board can handle I don't want to push things any more that i did in that test (and don't feel the need to keep it beyond stock anyway).

I think with more time spent on controlling the power used, I'm sure one could get more frequency out of the CPU without running into the current limit as early.

Incidentally, when looking at the charts in Ryzen Master, I do see single cores spike to 4.3 GHz often, but it is only small blips. I guess that means it is working, but maybe not in a very meaningful way from a processing throughput perspective. I will believe that it helps with responsiveness however, just so I can feel better about getting the 2700X over the regular 2700, LOL (especially since I'm not using the stock heatsink).

I am using a Noctua NH-U14S for my CPU heatsink, and it runs at a very slow speed and keeps the processor quite cool, so I know thermals aren't a limiting factor. I'm typically around 55C when gaming.

At some point I may try disabling some cores to see what that does to frequency.

Regarding the CPU fan, you may want to go into the Motherboard BIOS and check the fan configuration settings. I know that my Z77 motherboard (the one I upgraded from), would default to maximum fan speed if my BIOS settings were lost. I would need to change the setting to be temperature based at which point it would slow way down until things started getting warm.

On my B450 motherboard I did something similar, creating a custom fan profile to try and keep things quiet until the CPU got to 60C (which is allows almost all usage scenarios to be near silent), and only then ramp up to max speed depending on temps. The nice thing about convection is that you don't need much airflow to make a big difference in heat transfer, so with a large surface area on your heatsink you should be able to run pretty quietly under most conditions. Might just need to play around with settings a bit to find the right balance for you.


Finally, regarding graphics, at 1440P you will be GPU limited in many scenarios, so the CPU will usually make only a small difference in frame rates. I'm also doing 1440P gaming, but upgraded from a GTX 680 to an RTX 2080, so I am seeing a big difference due to the GPU upgrade. In games that are not GPU intensive, the improvement is minimal.

-AG

 

[rbk123]

Would upgrading from a i5 2500K 4.4 Ghz to this be worth it or more of a lateral move?

I have a 2500k at 4.5Ghz as my HTPC. I recently built up a 1700x I'm running at 3.8G. Handbrake encodes runs 3x as fast on the Ryzen as they do on the 2500k.

 

[dmoney1980]

What graphics card?

Rtx 2070

 

[ozzy702]

Rtx 2070

Nope, you're 100% GPU limited at 4k with that GPU.

 

[ryzenmaster]

In gaming I notice very slight hitching at times and while the overall performance is better than my 4690k was it's not as much a difference as I thought.

When you have > 4 cores you might want to consider disabling core parking from Windows. I remember some games having stuttering with core parking enabled. This will reduce your chance of hitting max single thread boost though as the scheduler will more actively schedule threads between all cores maintaining their clocks higher. Easiest way to disable core parking is to set power profile as 'High performance'.

At any rate the difference in gaming would remain small. The real gains in your case are in parallel throughput.