Great CPU for everyone at stock, challenging for overclock enthusiasts.Edit 13 - “Guess who’s back, back again.”BIOS F60f Update AGESA ComboV2 1.1.0.0 D, 5000 series compatibility and all that sweet refined micro code goodness. Finewine TM.If you can get the 5000 series do it, 5600X seems great for gaming right now, 19% increase in FPS over 3000 series is legit. So unless you actually need the extra cores of the 3700X or 3800X don’t get them.Keeping it brief, got a new job, lots of intense work, moved, computer throwing fits, “ain’t no body got time fo dat,” new laptop, furloughed, ‘I got time for dat,’ fixed, “~it’s been a whileee~,” updates, and here we are.This latest BIOS seems to have smoothed out my experience to glass, my only solid evidence is a few runs in Time Spy which had the highest CPU scores I’ve ever had, 10,762 vs 10,581. Doesn’t seem like much, but the CPU physics test stays at a high frame rate with no jutters unlike before. Micro stutters that I used to see from my pair of GTX 570s were common for me to see in these CPU physics tests. That is no more.DRAM OCs are also stable with 1usmus‘s Calculator v1.7.3, 3800CL16 1.4v (from 3600CL18), snappy and not crashy. Might try for 4000 again but then again maybe not.Unfortunately that seems to be the extent of my rig’s power. My GTX 1070 Ti is quite upset with me and doesn’t hold high OCs anymore. Not getting a new GPU last year seems to have been a bad call I guess since it’ll likely be fall before prices become reasonable again.I’m going to finally move forward with my mono-block and multi radiator install and have very stabile OCs with maybe one last GPU upgrade in the future.Man, what a crazy couple years huh? Stay safe out there.Edit 12 - “Welcome to the party pal!” : BIOS F50 AGESA 1.0.0.4 B, ‘Return of the Features’, memory overclocking, CPU under volting, and 1usmus Power Plan conclusion.Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sales mean choosing the 3800X over the 3700X is easy as the likelihood of a better binned chip and better Infinity Fabric is worth the $30-$40 price difference. So welcome to Enthusiast Land where we find the limits for fun! And while I do encourage others to join it can be rough out here sometimes.BIOS F50 AGESA 1.0.0.4 B, the refinement of the microcode has helped stabilize my computer’s performance. (Reset the profiles again!) It also brought back many features that I forgot my board came with. It’s been interesting to see a new base line of performance emerge and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand the 3800X’s performance is better than ever, and on the other hand I’ve got a tighter window to find increased performance. Yes it’s nice to have better performance than before but dang if it isn’t annoying to have my tweaks repeatedly nulled.The BIOS for my X470 board had a bunch of features removed for the launch of the 3000 series for stability reasons I suppose and I got so used to it that I only remembered them when this BIOS brought them back. CPU features like AMD Cool’n’Quiet came back and some voltage controls can actually control voltage again. Other features Have been gradually added from X570 boards like CPPC, Global C-state Control, and PPC Adjustment. Which leads us to 1usmus‘s power plan.So with all these features now active again or introduced the 1usmus power plan actually works. It’s only noticeable when the processor encounters a lightly threaded program or many single thread programs. The normal AMD Power Plan distributes these jobs seemingly randomly over all the cores. 1usmus’s Power Plan focuses all the processes on your best CCX and sleeps the other CCX.Going by AMD’s statements the best pair of cores in one CCX on your CPU (usually Gold Star and grey dot) are supposed to be the best at handling high demand or have high overclocking/electrically stable potential. Which makes it seem like 1usmus PP is how it’s supposed to be. Neither plan is perfect. AMD idles hotter but is on average cooler than full work load 1usmus. And W10 keeps messing with my results too.I now prefer to use 1usmus but with my own Ryzen Master OC acting as a firmer boosting and peak voltage guide. I sincerely wish I could control how much voltage is sent to each core and have a ramping effect rather than keeping one core constantly at peak voltage. Keeping the 3800X cool is all you need for stability as when I’ve tested 1.275 and kept it under 65C it easily ran 4.45/4.40. After 65C my cooler hits a thermal runway with my 3800X and can’t get rid of the heat fast enough.If you can get a good custom water cooling set up, two 240s or two 280s, and you keep it under 65C, you can probably find awesome overclocking/under-volting potential.With this better default performance in mind let’s test memory. Average of three.Full default motherboard settings, XMP, and Ryzen Master OC.BIOS F50 3800X Default 2133 DRAM 1200 IF-vs-BIOS F50 3800X Default 3600 XMP DRAM 1800 IF-vs-BIOS F50 3800X (4.35/4.30 1.35v) 3600 XMP DRAM 1800 IF———————————————————————————Cinebench 15: 2154 - 2164 - 2237Cinebench 20: 4943 - 4954 - 51323DMark11: Physics FPS: 54.58 - 62.55 - 63.393DMark Cloud: Physics FPS: 53.76 - 56.18 - 56.843DMark Sky Diver: Physics FPS: 66.85 - 75.60 - 76.513DMark Firestrike: Physics FPS: 74.01 - 78.73 - 77.43 (W10 strikes again)3DMark Time Spy: Physics FPS: 31.92 - 35.57 - 36.16Stage 1 tweaking. This was easy to achieve but soaked too much time. (NA is too bored to carry on)BIOS F50 3800X Default 3600CL16 DRAM 1800 IF-vs-BIOS F50 3800X (4.35/4.30 1.35v) 3600CL16 DRAM 1800 IF-vs-BIOS F50 3800X (4.35/4.30 1.35v) 3800 XMP DRAM 1900 IF———————————————————————————Cinebench 15: 2162 - 2220 - 2255Cinebench 20: 4985 - 5160 - 5146 (W10?)3DMark11: Physics FPS: 63.74 - 64.27 - 64.503DMark Cloud: Physics FPS: 55.27 - 56.16 - 57.703DMark Sky Diver: Physics FPS: 76.46 - 78.58 - 77.493DMark Firestrike: Physics FPS: 79.34 - 80.48 - NA3DMark Time Spy: Physics FPS: 35.61 - 36.83 - NAStage 2 tweaking once I get in the mood again. Zen 2 BIOS has come a long way in performance.Really want a better GPU to stretch my 3800X’s legs with.Edit 11 - Yippie Ki Yay Overclock'n! : BIOS F50a AGESA 1.0.0.4 & Windows 10 1usmus Power Plan. Return of memory OC.It's here! (11/10/19) And wouldn't ya know it the changes in BIOS mean saved profiles no longer apply when loaded so time for new tweaks! It's all good news so far as the introduced changes in the BIOS have allowed me to further increase my Infinity Fabric Clock and my memory overclock. (11/15/19) 1900 IF and 32GB of 3800Mhz CL 18-20-20-20-36-58 memory @ 1.4v (still tweaking, there's more there). This has essentially tied my 3000Mhz CL14 in C20 and helped game FPS (Ryzen be like that). And startup times are most certainly decreased from before and feels like when I first switched to an SSD.Destiny 2 runs flawlessly now (8 hour marathon and no crashes! New record!).Now 1usmus is THE Ryzen memory overclocking guy and he came up with a W10 power plan that he claims boosts Ryzen performance. While I can't say for sure as I've been switching between my tweaks and the different power plans it seems to at least not decrease performance. There is however strange behavior from the average CPU voltage as a whole since W10 1903 (I'm on 1909) as it now only rarely sleeps cores. I'm still testing.9/10 would update to this new BIOS again.Edit 10 - Edit (insert Die Hard reference here): BIOS F42e (what happened to c and d?). Attempted improvements to aspects of the motherboard but an unexpectedly screechy side effect. So my CPU performance is still great but Gigabyte screwed up somewhere.While the notes for the BIOS don’t say much of anything and it’s still 1.0.0.3 ABBA, my system seemed to boot just a bit faster than before. And that would have been nice to keep but for what ever reason whenever I played Destiny 2 it glitched the audio out for over ten minutes each time (I quit before letting it go further) and screeched like a broken Halloween decoration. Not like, “boo,” more like stadium feedback mixed with a scream mixed with max treble and erratic high pitch and volume. I find enemy Hive screams pleasant in comparison. And this led to reinstalls of audio drivers, verifying Destiny 2 install, and testing in other games, but of course D2 is special.So I’m back to F42b. What ever initial ABBA BIOS you got, you might want to stick with if you play Destiny 2.Looking forward to 1.0.0.4 with ‘100+’ micro code improvements but like before you can expect it on X470/B450/X370 in around a month or so (late November or sometime in December).Side note: It’s winter! And that means attempting overclocking again with below freezing air flowing by! Long story short, not a noticeable difference, but the GPU liked it. Gamers Nexus already demonstrated that real automatic performance improvements only occur with LN2 and while that’d be fun, I just don’t have anywhere to put an LN2 container.Additional Side Note: I’m skipping the 5700 XT. The jury is out and most models have been tested by nearly every tech outlet. Similar to this CPU, almost all the overclocking headroom is already used and means no real tweaking. If the performance was just a bit more then I’d go for it but I have a 144Hz 1440p G-Sync monitor (before Nvidia embraced Free-sync) and losing that for frame rates that would show tearing just wasn’t enough for the switch. Still probably a red team future.Edit 9 - Edit harder: BIOS F42b. This not only implemented ABBA, the fix for boost problems, it also fixed a bunch of bugs in the Gigabyte BIOS in general. No more boot hitches, GPU driver errors, and memory overclocks are a breeze. Hurray!So yes, it automatically boosts properly now. I see 4.4-4.5 spikes on my best cores under load and all core auto is 4.2. OC All core is 4.35/4.3 @ 1.325V and 4.5/4.3 @ ~1.48 (it over heats almost immediately, see below).Sad news is I think my Corsair AIO is either failing or the horrible cold plate leveling is making direct cooling of the chiplets too difficult now. Its' copper surface is convex and therefore doesn’t cool the edges of the cpu properly. The chiplet for CPU cores is nearer the edge of the chip than typical mono chips.A quick word on my earlier edits CPU GHz numbers. Before Edit 5 I was using CPUZ and HWMonitor as Ryzen Master was broken on my computer. The new Ryzen Master to be used with the 3000 series installed an additional folder in the registry and then tried to reference the old Ryzen Master registry which broke the install until the old registry was deleted by me.During the testing of Edit 5 and after I began using HWINFO and Ryzen Master (then fixed). HWMonitor gives “optimistic” boost readings and CPUZ can’t tell the whole story. Looking at Ryzen Master, which only updates once per second, and HWINFO seems to correctly catch was HWMonitor almost gets. So the previous 4.5 readings were likely "stretch clocks”, not really increased performance, and single core readings of 4.65 sadly were likely a read error. (An earlier edit of this edit I screwed up and switched HWINFO and HWMonitor, they are correctly ordered now.)Edit 8 - A good day to Edit: Y’all fans of ABBA? Gonna be dancing soon enough to the latest BIOS that’ll have AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABBA, the fix for Zen 2 to hit the advertised boost clocks automatically.Rather than forcing the CPU to dance to my tune, which doesn’t quite jive with boost/voltage mechanics of Zen 2, it’ll boost to the rated clocks. While I’ve only heard of it beginning to hit X570 there aren’t any X470/B450 or X370 BIOS(s) being released yet and AMD is projecting broad releases by September 30th.Now I did in fact switch back to the now pulled/old F41c BIOS which was replaced by F41 officially. Since my motherboard has dual BIOS I can switch between them quickly. Long story short with exactly the same settings F41c posts and F41/F42a doesn’t. Basically, F41c rocks higher memory overclocks and tighter timings (my old OCs I missed you!). Downside, the CPU auto boosts are super inconsistent 4.1 - 4.3 under close to identical conditions (temp, ambient, active programs) using the same benchmarks. And it’s full of twitchy boosts like reacting to rapid mouse movements, which is present in F40 as well, F41 and F42a fix this.Side note: $200 for 32Gb 3600CL18 (OC CL16) with built in RGB and temp monitoring? Bought. I just had to get 3600 memory, I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed to know if it made a change, and it did. Better frame times and game FPS, but since it’s generally looser timings, Cinebench took a hit and I imagine production applications would take a hit as well. 3000CL14 got better scores than 3600CL16 but games ran faster.I’m not sure how much further I want to test tighter timings as I do want to get ABBA when it releases, but I’ll probably keep pushing it until something breaks because, “Yippee Ki Yay Overclock’n!”Edit 7 - Live free or Edit: Begrudgingly settled on latest BIOS for overclocking (7/31), oc scores, and the importance of Motherboards.BIOS F42a is a tricky one, coupled with updates to Windows I no longer get detectable voltage drops below 1v in auto. Keep in mind this is with the Ryzen Balanced Power plan as well. Granted it was through monitoring software and an oscilloscope would be ideal. But if we look at my temperature monitoring, my CPUs idle temps went up around 10C, maybe another BIOS or Windows update will change it. You can go see my over clocking results near the bottom of the review, which slightly decreased over time with one update after another but the average improvement currently over stock is around 8%.My previous boost clocks are down and I am running headlong into thermal limits before I get back to my old manual oc. I’m considering going back to BIOS 41c and I’ll probably edit when I’m done testing again.Motherboards: I use the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi, I like the board but some of the BIOS updates have been kinder to me than others, and if you want to get the most out of your 3800X you might really need dig deep. One of the most interesting recent developments with Zen 2 is how different motherboards using the same CPU can’t achieve the same clock speeds. One examination by Hardware Unboxed looked at 14 different motherboards with most being X570 and one being a B350. Of the 14 motherboards only six met or exceeded the 3800X’s boost clock of 4.5Ghz with manual adjustments. Of those six only three exceeded 4.5, the Aorus Xtreme (4.550), MSI A Pro (4.525), and Aorus Master (4.525).There’s performance available with the right motherboard it seems and being on X570 might mean fewer wacky and frustrating BIOS ‘updates’ like what I’m going through on X470.Edit 6 - Edit with a Vengeance: Yet another BIOS, F42a. RIP my old OCs but Cinebench 20: 4501 -> 4687.Thanks to the dedication of many internet and YouTube based reviewers/researchers, voltages and clock speeds for Zen 2 are now better understood. 1.5 volt bursts are within design perimeters with it dropping to sub 1 volt when unengaged. (Often so fast it’s only detectible by Oscilloscope.) AMD has binned and designed these processors so throughly that traditional overclocking isn’t as applicable anymore. Zen 2 often try’s to reach user OC clocks and voltages only to score worse despite posting. It’s quite the journey and will continue to be at this rate. I’m enjoying the challenge as an enthusiast and even if I didn’t OC the performance gain over Zen + has been great. (REFERENCED: Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, LinusTechTips, Level1Techs, Der8auer, AMD Reddit, and AMD.)Edit 5: New chipset and drivers and BIOS oh my! Suffice to say, Cinebench R20: 3715 -> 4501.Edit 4: While I'm still working on OC results the prelim finding is as follows: All core OC (4.5) is great for full load applications but the manual tweaking to get controlled automatic operation (auto boosts) is better for games. (3.2 to 4.65)Edit 2/3: After reinstalling F4 BIOS and 2600X, testing F4, F30, F40, and F41c BIOS; then testing and retesting 3800X with F40 & F41c, the results seem to have settled down. F40 played Nice with the 2600X more than 41c and 3800X likes the 41c better.Some strange system behavior prompted the BIOS testing which was irritating me as while the 2600X obeyed my instructions and settings and the 3800X didn’t. After diving deeper and probing further I remembered what I read on reddit about some motherboards pushing 30-50% more watts than spec. Not only did limiting PPT W to 105W lower temperatures, it also curbed voltage spikes with more consistent lower Vcore when idle: 1.00 Vcore. When under load it only occasionally taps 1.380 and hangs around 1.3-1.35. So all this in addition to what settings I used below actually resulted in some better scores in some places, which I’ll put a note on. Although it did lower boost frequency in some spots I’ll still have to test more. Side note: I’ve never had to work this hard to make a CPU run around spec. I mean I sort of knew it was coming but good lord. And I haven’t even serious started overclocking yet.Edit 1: Wrangle that voltage. (See voltage.)Bought at $399.99. Looking forward to hopefully a better binned 3700X essentially.Finally arrived looks pretty legit but with all these BIOS updates and even Nvidia driver changes my old overclocks have become unstable on both the 2600X (RIP 4.2@1.325) and 1070Ti. For example, after updating to the first Ryzen 3000 BIOS I lost the OC on my Ram from 3333CL15 to 3333CL16. Was previously proved stable via Prime95 and memtest86. Booting is also strange and hiccups compared to 2600X boots, it boots but hangs a couple times. Hoping future BIOS updates will even things out.(Edit: each newer BIOS killed my mem oc I can only run tweaked 3000CL14 without errors anymore.)Voltage: The default Gigabyte determined voltage being sent to the 3800X is scary (1.35 - 1.55 Vcore) so I’ve set Vcore to Normal with a -0.10 Dynamic Vcore and Standard on the Loadline Calibration so it typically runs at 1.205 - 1.380. That is the baseline I’m using for the 3800X, with this setting it turbos to 4.4 GHz almost all the time and all-core 4.3.Focusing on CPU results from benches as I'm waiting on custom RX 5700 XT cards and my 1070Ti is already a bottleneck.It’s also worth mentioning that my gpu usage has gone up from 97-98% which I just assumed was the peak to 98-100% not just as spikes but as constant usage. It already seems like the tests and some games are already smoother.2600X Auto OC XFR (1.35-1.45 Vcore) VS 3800X Auto (1.2-1.4 Vcore)—————————————-Cinebench 15: 1236 - 1597Cinebench 20: 2734 - 37153DMark11: Physics FPS: 41.76 - 54.743DMark Cloud: Physics FPS: 37.00 - 46.733DMark Sky Diver: Physics FPS: 51.71 - 65.383DMark Firestrike: Physics FPS: 57.23 - 71.333DMark Time Spy: Physics FPS: 21.91 - 29.483800X BIOS 40/41 Auto VS 3800X BIOS 42c OC 4.4 Ghz 1.45v (not recommended)——————————————————Cinebench 15: 1597 - 2150Cinebench 20: 3715 - 49483DMark11: Physics FPS: 54.74 - 57.883DMark Cloud: Physics FPS: 46.73 - 52.443DMark Sky Diver: Physics FPS: 65.38 - 71.653DMark Firestrike: Physics FPS: 71.33 - 75.603DMark Time Spy: Physics FPS: 29.48 - 33.37Note: 3800X @ 4.325Ghz 1.375v yields very slightly worse results than 4.4 but is significantly cooler.Spec: -2600X@4.2 to be replaced by 3800X-Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi-Corsair V. LPX 3000CL15 (@3333CL15) 32Gb (4x8GB)(Retired)-Corsair V. RGB Pro 3600CL18@3800CL18-Corsair H100i Pro x 2 x Corsair LL120 RGB-Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250GB NVMe-Samsung 860 Evo 2TB SSD-MSI 1070Ti 8GB Titanium-Corsair AX1200iAvid overclocker since 2011 Sandy.