Be careful when using motherboard vendor overclocking software, because the safety is off.
When the Ryzen 7 5800X3D came out and allowed AMD users to instantly upgrade an aging AM4 machine with a CPU competitive against Intel’s latest and greatest, a whole lot of people snatched them up, including your author here. It’s a great CPU for PC gamers, with enough cores to handle background tasks while gaming, and enough cache to allow the Zen 3 architecture to meet its potential.
It does have one Achilles heel, though, and that’s the relatively low clock rate. While it’s not that far behind the regular Ryzen 7 5800X, the 5800X3D does lose out in most productivity tasks. Comparing it against the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 parts, the 5800X3D hangs tough in a lot of games, but loses badly in some, and really falls behind in productivity tasks.
You might be tempted, then, to overclock your eight-core X3D CPU and eke out a little extra performance that way. Unusually, AMD actually locks out overclocking on CPUs with 3D V-Cache, and the reasoning behind this is that the cache die itself is very sensitive to extra voltage—like, “could-instantly-die-when-overvolted”-sensitive.
