AMD has announced a lot of the juiciest details about its Ryzen 3000 processors over at Computex, as I’m sure you’re already aware. If not then get out from under that rock you’ve been living under and catch up on the 12-core Ryzen release date announcement over here. But even though we do have lots of techie info to be digging into, there are still some mysteries surrounding these upcoming processors, including the Ryzen 3000 chips’ overclocking potential for all the enthusiast performance hounds out there.
After chatting with Erin Maiorino, Ryzen desktop marketing manager at AMD during the Computex show this week, it sounds like AMD will be talking more freely about Ryzen’s CPU performance and overclocking potential over at E3 in a couple of weeks.
AMD has already announced it will be making an appearance at the show, hosting the Next Horizon Gaming event. We expect to hear a lot more about AMD Navi and the RX 5000-series graphics cards during the show, but we should also be hearing quite a bit more from AMD on the technical details of its Ryzen 3000 chips at the event, too.
The chiplet design innate to the Zen 2 architecture could make for an interesting prospect for overlockers. After all, the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X has two chiplets, or, in other words, two tickets to the silicon lottery. How that will actually work in practice, however, is something we’re still not sure about.
Chip shot: These are the best gaming CPUs around today
With two distinct chiplets – likely with each chunk of up-to-eight-core silicon displaying different voltage and frequency tolerances – overclocking cannot be a one-size-fits-all job with the new Zen 2 design. Whether that means per-chiplet frequency and voltage control we don’t know, but it’s going to be a fascinating ride finding out the answer.
We quizzed AMD’s Erin Maiorino about the overclocking potential of both the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and the X570 chipset as a whole, and the somewhat cryptic response was: “No, no comment on that just yet… in ten days, we should be pretty good.”
With the Next Horizon Gaming event at E3 kicking off on June 11 it’s a pretty solid bet that’s what AMD is referencing…
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But AMD was quite happy to talk a little more about the X570 chipset over at Computex. The chipset design was indeed put together in-house, as heavily rumoured before the announcement, and is built on the 12nm process node, compared with the 7nm chiplets and their 14nm I/O silicon.
And that almost ubiquitous motherboard chipset fan? That’s because the TDP has increased to around 11 Watts with the in-house design, largely thanks to the PCIe 4.0 connectivity and speedy I/O introduced with the new platform.
“We know there’s some trepidation after some of the earlier motherboards that had this,” Maiorino says. “So making sure that these only turn on when necessary and will be keeping cool and quiet as well.”
Be sure to tune in to the E3 Next Horizon Gaming event on June 11 at 3PM PT, where we’re going to get more overclocking and graphics performance details. We’re sure it’s not going to be one to miss.