Ryzen 5 1500X + AB350M Pro4

I noticed that I had had gear down mode enabled the whole time, which means the CR1 I stated earlier wasn't exactly accurate. I've set tRDWR to 6 instead of seven, disabled gear down mode and set command rate manually to 1T and the next step is to do stability testing.

The L3 Cache test on Aida64 has me a bit worried. The results are all over the place, with the worst runs scoring less than half of what the best runs score. Even the latency, which most of the time is 12.2 ns, can sometimes hop to over 20 ns. Maybe the RAM timings are somehow indirectly affecting L3 Cache? Or maybe the benchmark is just very sensitive to background processes.

The CPU settings had at some point switched to auto, which meant the CPU was running at 3.6 GHz. This explains large part of the lower scores in benchmarks and once I corrected the clock speed to 3.7 GHz I started seeing familiar figures. For some reason I still seem to get the best scores in CPU-Z, if I keep the timings at stock XMP timings with CL set to 14 (I haven't tested with CL16, though). As soon as I switch from 14-18-18-18-38-56 to, say, 14-16-16-16-35-51, I seem to lose some points. Also, Aida64's L3 Cache results start to show very low figures, although I'm not quite yet sure if this is just bad luck. In any case, I ran Passmark's MemTest86 from a bootable USB stick at 14-18-18-18-38-56 and no errors were encountered (4 passes, roughly 3.5 hours). At least for now, I'll consider these memory settings stable.

At the moment I'm stress testing 3.8GHz @ 1.3V with Aida64. The stress test crashed within a minute @ 1.25V and within two minutes @ 1.275V, but has now been running without issues for about half an hour. The measured Vcore seems to be constantly higher than what I've set in the BIOS. Aida64 is now showing a steady Vcore of 1.318V, and the offset was more or less the same with the other settings. Now, assuming 3.7GHz was stable at 1.25V (I'm not 100% it was, although I didn't encounter any issues), and assuming 3.8GHz is stable at 1.3V, getting 3.9 GHz stable would likely require unhealhy amounts of Vcore. We'll see how stable this current setting is, but it may be that I'm close to the limit already. The positive thing about the current settings is that temperatures do not seem to have skyrocketed. Instead, I'm looking at an increase of about 5C compared to my previous settings, which leaves me hovering at 77-78C, apart from a few very short spikes to slightly over 80C. I'll have to see where Prime95 takes those numbers, but so far the numbers feel acceptable.

Slightly off topic, but while doing all this, I've encountered a few issues with my motherboard:

-The CPU fan header doesn't seem to know any other settings than "full blast".
-The BIOS profiles do not work. If I save a set of settings and try to load it, the BIOS crashes slightly after the settings have been loaded or reboots the computer even before I have the chance to click "ok". (This is on BIOS 3.3, the only BIOS version I've tried.)
-Booting from an USB stick is a pain, since for some reason the motherboard is picky about which port I use. I had this issue already when trying to install Windows and had to try a few different ports before the BIOS realized there was an USB option for booting. Same thing happened today with the Passmark MemTest86 USB-stick (USB 3.0 just like the Windows installation media). I don't remember which port accepted the Windows USB-stick, but with MemTest86 I tested one of the front panel USB 3.0 ports and one of the rear panel USB 3.0 ports until a rear panel USB 2.0 port finally found the USB stick (edit: This seems to only occur at boot. When Windows has started, it hasn't so far mattered which port is used).

Needless to say, I'm not very impressed with the quality control of ASRock. This stuff is basic and any manufacturer should be able to get these features rock solid, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be happening at ASRock (I don't know about the others). I also had USB port issues with my previous ASRock board, the 970M Pro3, so it feels like ASRock keeps repeating at least some of its mistakes.


Edited by PetrolHead - 31 Dec 2017 at 11:38pm

3.7GHz @ 1.3125V  (1.344V) was stable for 4 hours in the standard Prime95 blend test. Max temps were 84C CPU and 61C socket.

3.7GHz @ 1.275V (1.296V) was stable for 1 hour in the standard Prime95 blend test. Max temps were 80C and 59C socket. I'll do a longer test later, but so far so good.

3.7GHz @ 1.25V (1.280V) was stable for 8 hours in the standard Prime95 blend test. Max temps were 77C CPU and 57C socket.

It seems I was partially right about the CPU fan header after all, but the issue seems to be related to software, not hardware. The cooler spins at different rpms when I use silent, standard or performance mode, but the custom setting doesn't work. The fan spins at roughly the same rpm regardless of whether the CPU is under the 65% limit or over the 90% limit. I guess I'll have to wait and see if the next BIOS update will fix it.