Overclocking
On the CPU section of the “advanced freqency” tab, you get to choose a multiplier for the CPU clock speed. The stock is 37 but after a bit of tweaking, I was able to get a stable overclock of 4.1GHz using a 41.00 Multiplier. That’s pretty impressive since the highest overclock I’ve hit with this CPU is 4.175GHz on a more expensive X470 motherboard.
Now that we have a stable CPU overclock let’s see what we can push my RAM to.
You get a ton of options for customizing your RAM, Everything from the speed to the timings to just about every other detail with RAM can be customized. To keep things simple I just enabled the XMP profile so that my RAM would run at 3000MHz. I did spend some time trying to run above the RAMs rated speed but anything above 3000MHz resulted in a crash. This happened on the X470 motherboard too so it’s likely a limitation of the RAM.
Next up we can control the voltage for everything. I kept the RAM set to auto since I am using a XMP profile but I did have to tweak the CPU voltage just a bit to get my 4.1GHz OC stable. One thing to keep in mind here is you set a voltage offset (in my case a +0.25v) instead of picking a set voltage like some other motherboards. I did notice that this motherboard seems to max out around 1.35-1.4V but it is hard to tell for sure since the voltage changes depending on the load.
Overall for a budget motherboard, you get a surprising amount of customization here. As before you don’t get as many options as the top end X470 chipset but considering a majority of users would just tweak the CPU clock speed and maybe the RAM you can do everything you’d need on this motherboard.
I was also impressed with how close to a X470 chipset this motherboard was able to overclock my Ryzen 2700X. On a pricier X470 board, I was able to get to 4.175GHz while this board was able to reach 4.1GHz. While the X470 obviously wins in normal day-to-day usage the difference would only be a few percents. And this B450 board comes with a few things my X470 doesn’t like built-in WiFi and more integrated lighting!
Now that I have a stable overclock let’s check out some benchmarks!
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