- Now if I'm Intel at this point,
I'm hoping beyond hope that Ryzen
has reached its full potential.
Zen 2 basically spelled the end
for the leaks in enthusiasts' eyes
so much so that it's now starting
to leak into the mainstream even.
But unfortunately for Intel,
those enthusiasts have been busy and it ain't the end.
1usmus?
Is that how to pronounce that?
Of the Ryzen DRM Calculator fame
reached out to us with a special little project
that he's calling Workstation Tool.
It's an automatic overclocking
and simultaneous undervolting tool
that promises to both improve performance
and decrease power consumption on your AMD Ryzen processor.
Is it over?
Does AMD have the high ground?
Let's fire it up and see for ourselves, shall we?
And we're gonna see if today's video
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(upbeat music)
Now I know what you guys are thinking.
Come on.
This is just another one of those PC performance
tune up tools, registry cleaners,
that claims it's gonna improve performance,
but actually doesn't do anything.
And I understand your skepticism.
We even had someone reach out about sponsoring a video
with their performance tuning tool (beep),
and I install this thing and I'm like,
"Okay, so I've got all these numbers that say,
'Oh, you are going 30% faster on networking.'"
But I was like, "Hey, what benchmarks can I run
to demonstrate it's working?"
They were like, "Uh, you wanna run benchmarks?
What?"
No.
We have from 1usmus screenshots showing
in real benchmarks that people actually use,
like Cinebench, as much as a 9% performance improvement
after running this software.
And the craziest part?
He's providing it to the community for free.
Now it is a little bit complicated to set up,
which is why I brought in Anthony.
- Hello.
It's not as complicated as Zen underclocking
has been in the past.
First, you need to make sure that you're using a Zen 2 CPU.
Zen 1 and Zen+ as well as Renoir APUs
are not currently supported.
You'll also need to make sure your BIOS is up to date
with AGESA 1.0.0.4 Combo Pi being the lowest
1usmus has tested to work.
While you're in your BIOS,
there are still some settings you'll need to change as well.
You need to make sure your CPU Load Line Calibration setting
is set to level 4 for ASUS motherboards
or level 3 for other vendors.
And you'll wanna set CPU Phase Control to Standard
if your motherboard has a setting for it.
ASUS motherboards also have
a CPU Current Capability setting,
which you should set to 100%.
Once all that's done,
save your changes and boot into Windows,
where you'll want to make sure you've got .NET Framework 4.8
or higher installed, and then download Ryzen Master
as this is how the app gets its power,
frequency and temperature readings.
With all that done, you're almost ready to get started.
Download and extract the archive to a folder you can access.
We use the desktop.
And then download an extract Cinebench
from MAXON's website, not the Windows Store.
This version doesn't work.
The app actually uses Cinebench
as a useful before and after comparison between settings
and maintains a database of your performance results.
When all that's done,
we just run WST in the main folder, just like this.
Here's the app.
And what you'll see here at the top is a bunch
of information constantly updating.
This is coming from Ryzen Master.
On the left hand column, we have the core numbers.
So we've got core one, core two,
core three, core four on CCX1.
Five, six, seven, eight, on CCX2, et cetera.
In the middle, we have the effective clock speed
of each of these cores.
Right now they're basically nothing
because the system is more or less idle.
And on right hand side,
we have a number that indicates
exactly how good the core is for overclocking.
This is the number that the BIOS indicates to Windows
to tell it which core it should more heavily load.
So for our system here,
looks like CCX1 has pretty good cores.
CCX2 is, eh, it's all right.
CCX3, not so great.
4, that seems to be the lowest out of them all.
5 is pretty good.
Actually that's the best of them all.
We also have CPU usage, CPU temperature,
current voltage, total package power,
as well as some other AMD related power metrics here.
Let's take a look at the settings.
What the app does is it takes the reference frequency here,
which is the starting level,
and the maximum frequency that you enter in,
which is the end level.
And what it does is it steps through
each of those frequencies,
testing it each time to see which cores are actually running
at those frequencies, which ones are erroring out,
which ones are getting too hot, that kind of thing.
As it does that,
that's where cycle time comes in.
240 seconds, that is, 4 minutes, is the default
for how long it tests each iteration.
You can imagine this takes quite a while to do
but the outcome should be pretty great.
Now, a couple of other settings here
are a little bit confusing.
CCX delta.
This is actually set on a per CPU basis
and it should be set automatically
based on what your CPU is.
That being said,
it's not something to really worry about.
Ryzen 3 to 5 and 7,
I think are good for 75 megahertz.
Ryzen 9 I think is 150.
And Threadripper is 75 to 100.
We also have the testing mode here.
Currently it's on AVX Light,
which 1usmus actually says is
similar in terms of power draw
to what you might expect from a full AVX workload,
except it's not quite as hot.
So it's useful for testing coolers
that are a little bit less capable than what we have here.
The only other thing that's gonna be relevant
for most people is the reference voltage and target voltage.
Again, this is the start and end points,
much like the frequency here.
These are all pre-configured with values
that the software kind of thinks you might wanna use.
So I mean, if you want,
you can just hit Start and see what happens.
Otherwise, you can tweak these things
like the maximum temperature
or where you wanna start and stop
just to kinda narrow things down or try your luck.
Aside from that, there's not a whole lot else
to the program itself.
So let me go ahead and set a short cycle time
and hit Start and see what happens.
So the first thing that's gonna happen is
Cinebench R20 is gonna pop up
and it's gonna do a baseline run.
This is your CPU as it is normally.
So let's see what we get here.
It's a 3970X.
Looks like there was a previous run on this that was 16,927.
Let's see what we get here.
16,932, a little bit better.
Now it's gonna go through.
It set the parameters that we have here.
So, we only have 4,000 set for both the reference
and max frequency and 1,100 for the reference
and target voltage.
But the most interesting and really exciting things
about this program is that not only does it do all of this,
it still works with all of AMD's power management features.
You're basically getting the best of both worlds
between a straight underclock,
as well as overclocking per CCX.
It should make a huge difference.
- So that's it?
Run the utility and everything's dialed in?
I'm ready to get my performance gains?
- Basically, yeah.
It does take a little bit more effort than that.
It does require a little bit of tweaking
from the user's perspective, especially for a chip
that 1usmus hasn't actually tested yet, which is the 3970X.
He's got a 3960X.
So it took me a little bit of doing and a few BSODs later,
but here we are and should have everything all dialed in
for a nice undervolt.
It's actually a little bit slightly overclocked as well.
So it's about 3.9 on all cores
with a couple of CCXs dialed back one or two ticks.
- That's really cool having that level of granularity
where you can, just like AMD would tune them at the factory.
Go, "Okay yeah, this one's ever so slightly
better than that one.
Let's turn it up just a little bit more."
Super cool.
- Yeah, you could do this manually with Ryzen Master,
but, from experience,
it takes a lot longer than this does
and it is not as automated.
So, to do all of this would have taken so much longer
because I had to set up all the testing myself.
I'd have to crank everything on my own.
- And you'd have to be sitting there
staring at it the whole time.
- Yeah.
- Okay, so I can run Cinebench then?
- Yeah.
- Theoretically, there's not really a whole lot
to go wrong here.
If it's overclocked then it's gonna be faster.
Unless it crashes.
- [Anthony] Unless it crashes.
- Boy, these things are fast, aint they?
- Oh yeah. - Now one tip we got
from 1usmus via email
as we were going back and forth about this
was that the tool works best for CPUs that have more CCXs.
So wait, what was our before number?
- The before number was 16,900 somethin?
- That is a smaller performance gain than I expected.
- It's small, but at the same time,
the actual overclock was small.
It's within about 100 megahertz
of what it would normally be doing.
- So that could come down to us just having a chip
that doesn't undervolt and overclock particularly well then?
- Yeah, I tried doing a more aggressive overclock
and while I could get stable results, it wasn't consistent.
And I think that might be down to either our chip
or our load line calibration or phase control settings.
While dialing it in it's best to have it on Standard,
like I said, but he came back and said,
"Hey, if you're having issues with it, with stability,
try setting it twist extreme anyway."
And that should give you a little bit more overhead
as far as stability goes.
It might increase your thermals, but that's...
I mean, when you're dialing it in, that's less of a problem.
- So then should we have a look at
what our thermals ended up?
Do you have the before thermals?
- Well, I have, if you go to the Benchmark tab here,
this is our before run and this is our after run.
And our power usage is over there as well before and after.
- Wow, so 30 Watts less.
And ever so slightly greater performance.
- Yeah, so if I were to keep the same level of power,
I could increase the performance more.
The only problem, again,
being that this is a pre-production piece of software
and not tested on every chip.
He's gonna have it all massaged out
by the time it's ready for release.
So-
- The price is definitely right.
(Anthony laughing)
In a nutshell,
WST does automatically what we used to have to do manually
when overclocking our processors.
And what I think is really cool is the fact
that it uses the same standard tools
for both measuring improvements in performance,
as well as validating stability
that we as enthusiasts have been using for years and years.
Now, as you've seen here,
your mileage may vary.
You might not get a ton more performance,
or you might not even get a power consumption improvement.
There's nothing that 1usmus can do about
how good your chip came out of the factory,
but at least you've got it now.
And this really puts custom levels of tuning overclocking
in the hands of people
who only really know how to press one button.
Pretty neat.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
If you enjoyed this video
and you enjoy this kind of like software...
Wow, have we done much in the way of tuning software before?
- It hasn't really been much. - We never even,
we never even checked out his last piece of software,
so we're not gonna throw to our video.
Find a really good video on, uh...
- DRAM calculator? - DRAM calculator.
- [Both] Yeah.
- Find a good one on DRAM calculator.
We'll just kind of throw to that.
It's also from 1usmus and also free.