Overclocking
Our previous attempts at overclocking the Ryzen 7 2700X didn’t yield much of an improvement overall thanks to AMD’s more aggressive XFR2, but we’ll try again.
The think with MSI’s board is… it has an overclocking knob on it. No self-respecting enthusiast can help but start with literally ‘cranking it to 11’ and seeing what happens, so here we go…
Amazingly it actually POST’s at 4.4GHz! Vcore is a little aggressive at 1.456V though. Out amusement was short lived. At this speed we couldn’t even attempt to boot Windows, it would never even show the loading screen.
Dropping down to Game Boost level 10 got us to the windows desktop… for a few seconds, just loading the basic utilities in the background was enough to BSOD.
In the end we had to drop all the way down to 4.15 GHz to be able to run benchmarks, but this really only gave us a few more points in Cinebench since XFR2 can kick the clocks up into this range on its own.
Flipping over by hand, we bumped the multiplier up to a full 42.0x, and the clock speed up to 103MHz for a total CPU clock of 4,326 MHz. This got our Cinebench Score up to 1834cb. We expected higher, but the voltage at this speed causes some thermal throttling.
