Overclocking
The act of overclocking the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G is nothing special. In fact, it behaves exactly like other 2nd Generation Ryzen CPU’s do with an almost hard stop of 4.2GHz. Unfortunately, this sample required every bit of 1.4v to achieve that. I wouldn’t even call that result 100% stable either. While it never locked up during testing, it would occasionally do this while sitting idle which makes zero sense. This happened on at least two occasions. Overclocking was easy though as all that was required was adjusting the CPU voltage and turbo frequency multiplier. All other values remained set to automatic for the duration of testing.
As we saw, overclocking the Ryzen 5 3400G is a mixed bag in terms of benefits. While it does occasionally help in the application testing, it also hurt performance much of the time. Gaming was a real surprise as overclocking was universally beneficial even if the increases were slight.
Memory clocking also proved to be a weak point for this CPU. While I was able to clock RAM upwards of 3400MHz on this CPU, I did experience the occasional lockup. DDR4 3600MHz was unstable and anything beyond that wouldn’t POST. While it’s possible that greater speeds could be achieved with specific tuning, I didn’t bother with that as I doubt many people would put this processor on a $700 motherboard with RAM that costs more than the CPU does.
