High vs balanced power plan

Didn't notice any change.

Another thing I forgot to post is that while performance does stay at 3725 at idle/light load, under heavy load all the cores drop down to 3675.

 

Despite my certainty about intrinsic for CPU nature of that issue I am sure Win10 would control newest CPUs better. Power management for CPUs is implemented in processor power management modules (PPM) - separate for Intel and AMD. I am sure vendors co-develop these PPM modules, and of course legacy modules in Win7 have no clue about new features of newest CPUs.

 

I'll see if I can get a dual-boot going and report back.

 

Just remembered that CPUs have not only temperature limits but current (amperage) ones too. And it is logical that all cores in constant boost state need more current.

For example BIOS at my motherboard has two customizable current limits - short term and long term.

 

So I ran a few tests in Win10 and the results are the same. Only difference was that Ryzen Balanced Plan doesn't underclock idling as much as Win 7 Balanced.

So basically, if you throw heavy workload at it, it will never ever hit 3.9 without manual overclock. A bit misleading by AMD imo.

 

I always keep mine on balanced. No sense running your cpu at full speed if it's not needed. Especially if you are overclocking. I leave speedstep on and all other power stuff off.

 

Are you running (many) background apps? On my 8700K, sometimes (but not always), only having the antivirus or something like procexp in the background is enough to make sure the CPU won't boost to its maximum (because there are more than 1 cores used). Kill everything, put on High Perf., and there we go, boosting to its max.

What I can't explain is why you saw 3900 on Balanced and not on High Perf. That makes me think the CPU hits some sort of limitation, or you simply had apps running when you tried High Perf.

PS: on my PC there's basically 0 gain from running High Perf., or even the new Ultimate Perf. These plans were good for my old FX8350, High would gain me like 6-7 fps in WoW. But on the 8700K they basically have no effect on performance, same fps, same frametimes, same stuff all around.

 

Unless motherboard vendor has messed with power limit settings in the BIOS.

 

Yeah no background apps running. I should mention that with balanced plan and all core load it will not boost to 3.9 either. It's just performance plan that doesn't boost to 3.9 at all.
So I think ultimately I will stick with balanced as it is. In regular workload scenarios it boosts to 3.9 when needed so this seems optimal. I'd have to run some tests but I am doubtful how much a manual oc would benefit for normal use.
Realistically I'm looking at a choice between 4.1 at all times or 3.9 when necessary.

Don't think so, it's an Asus Prime x370 Pro. I think it's just the XFR that can't handle all core load that well.

 

Thare are settings of power plan which increase and decrease P-states, settings which increase (promote) and decrease (demote) C-states - according to CPU load.

 

It sounds as if you are forcing AMD's Cooln'Quiet on in the bios. The default bios setting on the MSI board I'm using automatically disables Cool'n Quiet when the cpu multiplier is set to anything above Auto. Also, make sure you are getting your AMD core-logic chipset drivers here:

https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows 10 - 64

They support Win7-Win10, and the AMD "balanced" plan. You want to enable the AMD balanced plan because it contains hidden settings relative to Ryzen--over and above the settings Windows displays and allows you to adjust--and I'm assuming that once you have installed these chipset drivers into your Win7 system, and rebooted, that you will see the "Ryzen Balanced" power-plan option show up (I don't have a Win7 system handy anymore so I'm drawing parallels with Win10 configurations.) Also, keep in mind that this is *the* page you go to for AMD Ryzen chipset drivers in perpetuity. (IE, they won't be changing the pages around on us, thankfully!) When the chipset drivers are updated with newer ones, this is where they show up when that happens. I prefer using these to my OEM's "chipset drivers" because MSI is currently loading in a lot of junk I don't need as well as giving me *older* x370 drivers--the entire chipset download from AMD is about 64MBs, but MSI's "chipset drivers" from the MSI site weigh in at a whopping 600MBs-1GB. Repetitious junk galore there, imo. Getting it exclusively from the AMD site has presented no problems for me.

Cool'nQuiet theoretically slows down your cpu (1.5GHz sounds reasonable at the bottom end) when you don't need it-- like when web browsing, etc.)--and will instantly bring CPU performance to 100% (or in-between) when needed--like for a game you run. That's the theory, and indeed, in my old FX-8320e and 970a chipset system it worked perfectly so I always kept it on. I never noticed a lag of any kind when the cpu would ramp to 100% from about ~40% or so. But that was then... Cooln'Quiet in the Ryzen incarnation doesn't seem to work that way when overclocked, for some unknown reason at present. If I run my Ryzen cpu @ the Auto multiplier then Cooln'Quiet seems to work exactly that way--but doesn't work reliably when the cpu is overclocked (which is why MSI turns it off automatically when overclocking, I'm guessing.) In the FX system, Cooln'Quiet worked consistently when the cpu was overclocked--in the system Power Plan under Windows, if I put in a minimum of 50% and a max of 100%, and I overclocked the FX to, say, 4GHz, then the system cpu clock would fluctuate between 2GHz and 4GHz depending on processing demand. Doesn't seem to work as reliably on Ryzen, however, if the cpu is overclocked as I've said.

Besides, with AMD recommending the AMD Balanced Windows power plan, which is a minimum of 90% to a max of 100%, it would appear that AMD believes that such clock and power extremes really aren't necessary for Ryzen--which runs efficiently *enough* at its max stock clock. So I just turn off Cooln'Quiet these days and work with AMD's power plan recommendation--no problems of any kind to report. Hope this helps--I, too, was initially puzzled by the differences in the way CoolnQuiet worked on Ryzen as compared to the previous gen of AMD cpus, the FX series.

 

Cool'n'Quiet is apparently the same as Global C-state Control. Disabling it made no difference.

I'm looking at Jayztwocents video on Ryzen2. And his chip doesn't max boost on all cores either at stock. If you look at his first run @4:58 his cores only go to 4.025, whereas the chip's max boost is 4.3.
So this does indeed seem to be normal behaviour of XFR.

 

That 4.3 should be for one core only, you won't ever see it if it works like Intel turbo, because the OS already uses some CPU to run. I only see 4.7 on 8700K if I kill everything and run just HWINFO, then set High/Ultimate performance, and even then sometimes it still just goes to 4.6 instead. And this is for a barebones OS, nothing else on it but drivers.