Question on boosting Ryzen CPUs

[rivethead]

After many, many years, I'm looking to build a new system this winter. I'm starting my research and am strongly leaning towards one of the newer AMD Ryzen CPUs. Probably the Ryzen 5 2600.

I do not want to overclock, but I've come across this article on the MSI site that indicates there is an auto boost feature on AMD chips....essentially the mobo will overclock the chip when needed:

https://www.msi.com/blog/amd-ryzen-b350-vs-b450-chipset-difference

This "Precision Boost Overdrive" feature is appealing to me.

Anyone have experience with this?

And the B450 chipsets are the boards that do this? Or do other chipsets have this feature?

Lastly (and this is more a CPU question), is this the primary benefit of the "X" CPUs vs the non "X" CPUs (i.e. 2600X vs 2600)?

Thanks!

 

[ao_ika_red]

Just put big hsf tower like Noctua U14S or ThermalRight TrueSpirit 140 and the CPU will "overclock" itself as long as thermal / power headroom is still available. That's PBO in a nutshell.

B450 or X470 is the board you want to have for 2000-series CPU because its BIOS had 2000-series CPU in mind from day one.

X series are clocked higher and have higher TDP (105W / 95W on X series CPU and 65W on non-X series CPU)

 

[rivethead]

Thanks. But PBO would still work with the stock Wraith cooler right? Just not as much?

I ask because......if I'm going through the effort of buying/putting an aftermarket cooler (or water cooling) on the chip, I might as well manually overclock it too. The appeal of PBO to me was simplicity.....don't mess with any of that but still get some overclocking when needed.

 

[Malogeek]

Thanks. But PBO would still work with the stock Wraith cooler right? Just not as much?

Generally it will clock higher on lower temps yes, depending on core usage.

I ask because......if I'm going through the effort of buying/putting an aftermarket cooler (or water cooling) on the chip, I might as well manually overclock it too.

Normally I'd agree. With the new Ryzen's I'd leave it to do its own overclocking. If you're going to push it hard for all cores on productivity then it might be worth it for an extra 100-200Mhz but for general use I'd let it do its own clock management.

I'm not sure how the PBO differs between 3xx and 4xx chipsets. I have an X370 and went from a 1700 to the 2600X. It boosts really well on my Noctua cooler to 4.2Ghz and I believe that's about its limit anyway. Buying a new system I'd go for a 4xx chipset anyway.