Enthusiast has created a utility for clever overclocking of AMD Zen 2 processors. Performance increases, power consumption decreases
A well-known enthusiast, Yuri 1usmus Bubliy, who has already become famous among Socket AM4 users with his utility DRAM Calculator for Ryzen, is preparing another useful program for release. It will help owners of Zen 2 processors to squeeze additional performance out of their systems while reducing power consumption.
The utility is called ClockTuner for Ryzen (CTR) and is a tool for low-level frequency and voltage control of CCX complexes of Ryzen and Threadripper processors belonging to the Zen 2 generation, i.e. Matisse and Castle Peak. Unfortunately, this program will not be able to work with earlier Ryzen processors, but the author promises to implement compatibility with the expected carriers of the Zen 3 microarchitecture.
The principle of operation of ClockTuner for Ryzen boils down to the automatic classification of CCX-complexes by quality and individual selection of the maximum frequency for each of them. This allows you to fine-tune the processor, not just increasing its performance, but at the same time reducing power consumption. In fact, we are talking about intelligent overclocking of each CCX-complex, which is performed with associated optimization of the voltage curve. Although this approach disables Precision Boost 2.0 technology in favor of overclocking to fixed frequencies (individual for each CCX complex), all power-saving processor functions remain operational.
To illustrate the efficiency of his brainchild, Yuri shared the results obtained in systems based on Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen Threadripper 3960X processors. In the first case, the use of ClockTuner for Ryzen allowed a 6.5% increase in performance while reducing power consumption by 9% (when tested in Cinebench R20).
In the second, the processor received a performance gain of 5.3% with a simultaneous decrease in power consumption by 4.2%. However, since the utility selects the parameters for each processor individually, the results will differ in each specific case.
It is important that the ClockTuner for Ryzen program fully automates the setup process and does not require any special knowledge from the user. The utility will integrate all the necessary tests (Prime95 to check stability and Cinebench R20 to check performance), and the interface will optimize performance and power consumption “in one click”.
The utility can work on any motherboard since it directly operates on the low-level SMU registers of the processor and does not depend on either the chipset or the BIOS.
As the author promises, public access to ClockTuner for Ryzen will be open in mid-September, and the utility is currently in a closed beta test.
