How I Overclocked the Ryzen 9 3900XT to World-Record Speeds

[harlan4096]

With the help of liquid nitrogen, I brought the 12-core chip all the way up to 5.7-GHz.

AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900XT has been out for a bit now, and thanks to COVID-19 (I’m an eternal optimist), I’ve had ample time to play around and see what's going on with these new, high-frequency chips. I even managed to snag a few world overclocking records for the Ryzen 9 3900 XT along the way.

When I was first asked if I wanted to try these new chips out, I figured, ‘meh.’ There doesn’t seem to be much difference between the X and XT models, and AMD probably just uses higher voltage and increased the turbo multiplier on a few cores. I have been wrong plenty of times, and I was again: The Ryzen 9 3900XT CPUs are cherry silicon. 

At the time of writing, the 3900X is $429 and the 3900XT is $479. That means you can have higher turbo clocks and better overclocking capability for roughly the cost of going out for a steak dinner (which you can’t do right now; thanks again, COVID). AMD really made a good move here. The performance increase is just enough to satisfy us overclockers, but not so much as to anger new 3900X owners. Meanwhile, AMD makes some extra revenue on what is essentially a super-binned Ryzen 9 3900X.  

Real World Overclocking I used the same components for real-world testing that I used for liquid nitrogen, but tapped the Enermax Aquafusion 3x120mm AIO for cooling. With my CPU already having been flattened (aka lapped), I wanted to check the surface of the AIO to make sure it was first as well. 

As you can see, it looks great, nice and flat!  

I tend to strictly favor the performance side of things, so aesthetics aren’t really in my realm of consideration. The cooler does a great job of handling the 1.4V I fed to the core at 4.55ghz through multiple loops of Cinebench R20. Temps reached the mid-80C's. 
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