Overclocking
Overclocking isn’t what it once was. It’s virtually pointless outside of some rare situations on a 3900X. With some of the other CPU’s which have only a single chiplet and lower single-core boost speeds, it may be of some value, but not in this case. The fact is, the 3900X just isn’t worth overclocking outside of heavily multi-threaded applications and I’d still argue that it wouldn’t be worth the trade off most of the time.
Having said that, reaching 4.3GHz, which is roughly the wall for this CPU is really easy. All I had to do was set the CPU vCore and the CPU multiplier to achieve a stable result. Memory clocking is even easier and I was able to clock our G.Skill Trident Z Royal modules to 3733MHz with flawless stability even though they aren’t rated for speeds that high. No voltage increase was necessary. With the proper modules, this motherboard can clock RAM if desired.
But wait! There’s more………..
I don’t normally do this, but I did try overclocking the Ryzen 7 3700X, which was stable at 4.3GHz in some applications. However prolonged stress testing and even gaming would result in the system shutting down as the CPU would get too hot. Our sample CPU simply can’t do anything more than 4.2GHz on this or any other board so far.
In contrast, on the MSI board this same CPU would simply trigger a reboot rather than a hard shut down. The temperatures seemed fine on both boards. I wouldn’t read too much into the behavior as there can be a ton of factors creating the difference in behavior. This motherboard does now have a feature allowing independent CCX overclocking, but I didn’t have a chance to play with that too much. It is a feature that as far as I know, only ASUS has right now so that may be worth consideration.