Overclocking
I don’t want to take too much time addressing overclocking as that was covered in our Ryzen 9 3900X using this motherboard. I’ll try and keep this to specifics regarding the MSI MEG X570 motherboard specifically, rather than rehashing what the processor can or cannot do. The system never failed to POST, no matter what I did with it. I never had to experience a recovery or the watchdog feature. The motherboard offers a vast array of overclocking and tuning options within the UEFI. The amount of settings compared to any X470 motherboard I’ve worked on is almost overwhelming. The motherboard behaves very well whether you are overclocking in the BIOS or through Ryzen Master.
As I said earlier, the voltage hardware is more than capable of handling virtually anything that can be done with Ryzen silicon from an overclocking standpoint. It is as solid as it gets on that front. In two articles now we’ve talked about boost clocks and I don’t want to rehash that here. I will just say that we had experienced the issues on the older v1.1 and v1.2 BIOS revisions. On v1.3 with AGESA 1.0.0.3 patch AB, the issue was resolved.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X @ 4.2GHz (100MHz x42) DDR4 3600MHz
At the end of the day, I was able to see the maximum boost clocks with the motherboard set up for Precision Boost 2. PBO, really doesn’t do anything. Even manually entering PPT, EDC and TDC values doesn’t help. For an all-core overclock I was able to achieve 4.3GHz easily. The system was perfectly stable and there are some good reasons to use a manual overclock if you’re doing nothing but heavily multi-threaded workloads. If you do anything that benefits from single-threaded performance, you are probably better off using PB2 rather than a manual overclock.
Memory clocking is one of the big points AMD addressed with its X570 platform and Ryzen 3000 series CPU’s. That said, there are still some limitations with the design as you add modules or raise the clock speeds past DDR4 3733MHz. I didn’t spend much time trying to overclock our test RAM. The kit we were given operates at DDR4 3600MHz speeds with reasonably low latencies. I had no trouble getting that RAM to work at full speed. I did try some G.Skill FlareX for AMD RAM I had on hand which has been my gold standard for compatibility on Ryzen systems and it didn’t’ work right. So, compatibility may still be an issue.