How to Undervolt Your Ryzen 3000 Or 5000 CPU

What’s up everyone, Erik here and welcome to Hardware For Gamers. Today I’m going to show you how to undervolt a Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series CPU. Now if you don’t know, the basic principle of undervolting is to maintain the CPU’s auto boost, while decreasing the CPU’s temperature. you do this by lowering the voltage going to the CPU.

Now how you do this will be pretty similar across all motherboards and platforms. But dependent on your motherboards manufacturer and the tier of the motherboard you have, some of these setting could be in different locations or may not be available at all. Now that’s not to say you can’t still undervolt your CPU. This just means it might be more difficult to maintain the same performance. Because how much you can undervolt Is very dependent on the silicon of your CPU and the quality of your motherboard. Meaning, having a good motherboard will make undervolting easier, not necessarily better…

I’ll be undervolting my Ryzen 5 3600, on a MSI B550 Tomahawk. I’ll also be using the cooler that came with the CPU, that being the Wraith Stealth. Okay, with all that out of the way let's get started.

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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:28 reset UEFI
2:00 Free software
2:52 Baseline Tests
4:50 UEFI Undervolting
6:15 Rerun Benchmarks
7:15 Charts
8:53 Final Thoughts

Free programs:

System Specs:
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Motherboard - MSI B550 Tomahawk
CPU Cooler - AMD Wraith Stealth
GPU - Asus GT1030 passive cooler
OS Drive - 250GB m.2 nvme drive
PSU - Corsair RM550x
RAM - Gskill FlareX 3200 4-8GB
Case - QDIY Cool 5 open frame Case

Intro Music

[archiemourad]

Fantastic video. Had to undervolt my Ryzen 5 3600 due to high temps during summer. At the moment, a -0.1V undervolt dropped my temps from 80C to 66C while gaming with 0 fps loss! Thank you!

[ndennis]

Undervolted my 3600XT with your guide. Stable -Offset for me was -0.1000V, everything higher was leading to BSOD or just Bootcrash.
Max CPU Watt consumption went from 92W to 78W and CPU Temp went from 68°C to 61°C (Watercooled CPU).
Funny thing, the higher the -Offest leads to higher benchmark Scores till instant crash instead of lower benchmark scores.
Stock CPU-Z Benchmark single 526 multi 4228, -Offset 0.1V single 532 multi 4296, unstable -Offset 0.125V single 535 multi 4317.
Same goes for Cinebench. THX for this Guide!👍

[JMUDoc]

EDIT - be careful... I just had a Youtube crash with my -0.1 V undervolt, despite its being stable under long synthetic load stress tests. I think it's to do with the CPU changing between power states.
After finding what you think is a stable value, keep an eye on it in day-to-day use. I have gone back to -0.05 V.

[JMUDoc]

Good to hear it mentioned that low load-line calibration is the best for undervolting - the reason is a bit technical, but it amounts to the fact that the output of the VRMs is a square wave, and higher load line causes that wave to bounce (it's called "undershoot") further BELOW the target voltage.
If you are trying to find your lowest stable voltage, these dips, however brief, are enough to crash.

[Andrei]

Awesome, thanks for going into details when explaining what you're doing, it's been really helpful for me, doing this for the first time. Cheers

[anaveragehuman]

corecycler and ycruncher are great ways to test stability after faffing with undervolts and overclocks

[JMUDoc]

I tried this with my 3600 and managed -0.1 while keeping scores; my single-core score went UP slightly, in fact😁😁
Going to -0.125 caused the scores to tank, and it crashed when exiting the benchmark!
(I would enable PBO in the motherboard, too - the default setting might have it disabled.)

[cadensmith]

Went from 93 to 71-72C the only thing is my idle temp went up by about 30 but my fan speed is lower after adjusted so it’s pretty quite 👍

[ramiru]

thanks for this, we have the exact motherboard its easy to follow for me

[sensibledriver]

Everything you need to undervolt is in Ryzen Master. No need to go anywhere near the Bios. Been using it years.

[Isaard]

Nice video 👍
Have you tried using the amd curve optimizer combined with undervolting?

[hasnainbaig]

This actually works.With full usage my CPU temp stays at 77.

[alexstamaria]

thanks a lot for this video. running a ryzen 5 3600 on an asus tuf gaming b450m pro-ii mobo with a hyper 212 cooler, dropped temps by 10c+.
i achieved a stable undervolt at 0.175 offset, allowing the cpu to boost fully under load. pbo didn’t seem to help very much

[JMUDoc]

After screwing around with offsets for quite a while, I am forced to conclude that a static undervolt is easier for these chips. Don't worry about degrading them unless you are shoving 1.35 V+ in there - if you have set things up correctly there will be a slight vdroop under load, anyway.

Find out your all-core boost frequency, lock the voltage at 1.25 V (LLC in the middle of whatever range your board has, and max out your VRM frequency if their cooling is good), disable PBO, and use the "cinebench pass, reduce voltage" routine until it gets into Windows but fails CB. Then go back up and use longer/different stability tests, adjusting the voltage upward more, if needed.

[RidixGaming]

I guess it's my version of cinebench but the test is 10 minutes long for multicore. Was your video sped through this section? Just want to make sure I'm following along properly.

[minduton]

Undervolting by PPT limit is much better.

[Hybert_]

Just lost 8% performance after -0.025 undervolt and temperatures stayed the same. Will stick to the stock settings.

[Kompesa]

Good video, what would happen if I undervolted but also enabled PBO? Would it even work?

[camifx]

I'm so confused. I'm trying to fix my OC from continuing to crash. And this was so confusing. And I am about giving up on even trying to fix it

[nivea]

to complicated for normal people like me