Overclocking the Best: AMD Ryzen 3900 and MSI Motherboard Review

Overclocking the Ryzen 3900 can be a hit-or-miss experience, depending on the specific chipset. The primary chipset on the Ryzen 3900 X has shown promise, with the ability to reach high clock speeds. However, the Ryzen 3700 X has been more inconsistent in its overclocking performance. In contrast, the Ryzen 3600 X has demonstrated a sweet spot for overclocking, reaching high clock speeds without too much trouble.

In terms of overclocking, the best approach is to focus on per-core overclocking rather than all-core overclocking. This allows for more precise control over each core's voltage and frequency, which can lead to better overall performance. The Ryzen 3900 X has shown a good triplet, with one core reaching high clock speeds while others remain stable.

One of the standout features of the Ryzen 3600 X is its ability to reach high clock speeds without too much trouble. In a recent Geekbench run, this processor reached an impressive score of 4.5 GHz on two cores, thanks to XMP settings and a well-configured motherboard. However, it's worth noting that not all Ryzen 3600 processors have performed as well in overclocking tests.

The MSI motherboard used with the Ryzen 3700 X has shown promise, but its overclocking performance is hit-or-miss. In some cases, the processor has reached high clock speeds without too much trouble, while in others it has struggled to reach even 4 GHz on two cores. The best approach for overclocking this processor may be to focus on per-core overclocking and use software tools like Ryzen Master to fine-tune its performance.

The MSI motherboard's UEFI firmware has been a point of contention among users, with some reports of inconsistent updates and bugs. However, the company behind the board has been working hard to address these issues, ensuring that the firmware is bug-free before it is released to users. In contrast, some other motherboard vendors have taken a more reactive approach, updating their UEFI firmware as soon as they receive it from AMD.

The use of Linux on this system has been a seamless experience, thanks to the board's excellent iommu support. Each core and each RAM stick are separated into their own group, providing isolation for sensitive data and preventing interference between components. The PCI Express x16 slots also have excellent isolation, making it easy to add in add-in cards without worrying about conflicts with other components.

One of the standout features of this system is its ability to run virtual machines and isolated workloads on Linux. With a well-configured motherboard and the right software tools, it's possible to create a dedicated NVMe storage device or a PCI Express by one card slot for additional bandwidth. However, these configurations require careful planning and configuration to ensure that they are secure and reliable.

In conclusion, the MSI motherboard used with the Ryzen 3700 X has shown promise in terms of its overclocking performance and features. While it may not be perfect, this board provides a solid foundation for building a powerful and efficient system. With a little patience and tweaking, users can unlock the full potential of this processor and enjoy fast and responsive performance.

Final Verdict

The MSI motherboard used with the Ryzen 3700 X has been a good performer in our tests, but it's not without its limitations. While it provides excellent iommu support and isolation for sensitive data, its UEFI firmware can be inconsistent at times. However, the company behind the board is working hard to address these issues, ensuring that users have a seamless experience with their system.

In terms of overclocking, this processor has shown promise, but its performance can be hit-or-miss. With careful tuning and configuration, it's possible to reach high clock speeds without too much trouble. However, users should be prepared for some trial and error in getting the most out of this processor.

Overall, we'd recommend using a Trident Z Neo motherboard with this Ryzen 3700 X processor. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of the MSI board, it provides excellent performance and features that are hard to find elsewhere.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthings are a little dark a little underexposed because I've already exposed the world of fries and 3000 we're gonna take a look at the msi meg x5 78 because if everything's not aces at spades right although that implies the spades are bad and aces are good but there's ace ace 'as of spades no really actually I think it's more like I think it's more like the episode of deep space 9 where like they've mined the wormhole and the the enemy is gonna come through the wormhole if you know they managed to take down the minefield and that would be bad and the enemies working on taking down the minefield and you know the resistance on the inside figures out how to prevent them from taking down the mine field and they succeed just a hair too late so like you know it's really suspenseful and it's like all the heroes are gonna definitely prevent them from taking down the minefield not so much no it's like Rahm was in there and he's like done Oh too late oh he doesn't know so yeah it's kind of like that AMD literally made this amazing amazing product and then there's some stumbles out the gate and frustration for everybody but I think you know still not as bad as the x99 launch probably not as bad as the X 2009 launch but you know who's keeping score I digress it's basically stabilized at this point although I don't know that I would advertise the rise in boost speeds and things like that I'm really doing a terrible job selling probably the most amazing processor in ten years I mean if you get excited about computer processors the rise in 3000 series is like the computer processor to get excited about at least until thread rapport 3 which is going to devour halt the entire high-end desktop market I think but yeah I mean it really is an amazing product and most of the troubles have really just been around polished and testing and integration and things that problems of scale it's like oh man now that I suddenly have billions upon billions of dollars I'm gonna have to hire people to manage the money oh I don't not even first of all problems I don't know what to call that that's basically what I'm talking about and if you if you've been living under a rock you have no idea I'm talking about don't worry about it it's basically fine everything's good the bad news is you are going to have to update your UEFI pretty much out the gate on all of these boards and the versions you're looking for at least as of the time of this videos 1.0 0.0 0.3 abb and that version actually buggy but it's not as buggy as the older versions so what happened was the older versions of the UEFI sand and stuff provided by AMD not the board partners so like MSI doesn't have anything to do with this and I'll have a lot of transparency into it the controversy is that the older versions would boost the higher clocks including the speeds printed on the box and so I've been running Geekbench while we've been talking and I can see that actually I did boost to 4.4 gigahertz on a few cores but most of the other cores were like 4.3 gigahertz and less so not the best situation Geekbench detects this as a 4.3 5 gigahertz processor it is in fact a 4.4 gigahertz processor around the box I did in fact hit 4.4 gigahertz with the one point 0.0 0.3 abb BIOS which just came out a day ago from the time that I'm filming this which is also the reason that some of our X 570 coverage has been delayed I'm gonna have to put that disclaimer in like all the AMD videos alright that's really gonna suck I don't why it doesn't know it's like the Deep Space 9 thing it really is so yeah anyway msi has done an amazing job engineering this board it is very solidly constructed it is very well laid out and especially like the PCI Express layout and cooling so with X 570 everything's PCI Express for PC Xbox 4 is gonna generate a lot of heat that means that the chipsets gonna get hot that means that you know other parts of the board potential are gonna get hot in this motherboard will happily support up to the 16 core 39 50 X 16 cores on a m4 that's crazy the PCI Express for SSDs also get quite hot so the layout here is really good we've got three PCI Express by 16 slots this is a by 16 by 0 by 4 or by 8 by 8 by 4 the layout here means that your primary x16 slot has enough room for a triple slot graphics card so any kind of graphics card that you're going to be running you're gonna have plenty of room for it to breathe the other the final very bottom x16 slot it's also PCI Express 4 it's serviced by the tip set the bottom in dot two on this motherboard the very bottom one is serviced by the CPU the two on top are serviced by the chipset that's kind of a weird situation at least I'm pretty sure that's how it is because that's how it is on the god-like so I'm pretty sure that's how it is on the ace in terms of layout and ferreting through LS top boat to get a layout of the system if I'm wrong about that this is also a really cool situation because of the fan placement this is one of the only boards the places the piece extras for chipset fan far away from the graphics card so if you've got a huge chunk a graphics card it is not in any way going to interfere with the airflow around the chipset although I think like in practice and testing that as long as you've got decent airflow in your case like the placement of the fan really didn't matter too much again it depends on your graphics card and some other parameters if there's hardly any airflow in your case then it would be a bad situation for you because the exhaust from your graphics card would go into the chipset but as long as you have front intake fans or front fans that are moving air not really an issue it's kind of a meme so in terms of connectivity at the back we've got our Wi-Fi six yes motherboards got into a Wi-Fi six and our ps2 keyboard port which is great for me because I've got a plurality a mix of USB three five gigabit and ten gigabit ports this motherboard actually has five ten gigabit USB ports one for the front type Siwan a rear type C and then the rest are type-a which is really pretty awesome we've got optical s/pdif and gold-plated audio connections on the relatively high end Realtek ALC 12:20 based audio codec that is implemented on this motherboard if you're into the RGB Ness it's got the Corsair header it's got digital headers it's got other RGB headers and it also has the msi ace like mirror infinity mirror thing and of course all of this is controlled by the msi mystic light software one thing I mentioned real quick on the chipset fan it is a zero frozer which means that it will turn off when the chipset is under a certain temperature threshold so if you think you might be annoyed by tiny little fan trying to move air well it does you have the option of setting it to turn off below a temperature threshold to zero frozer so depending on what BIOS you're running in some profiles you'll get that out of the box but you can also configure it in the UEFI for fan interfaces terms of power delivery duel will 8-pin you don't really need dual 8-pin especially on the am for CPUs that you're not gonna draw enough power to overload a single 8 pin connector that said some motherboards will actually use that interface the power interface for more than just the CPU because the only other source of 12 volts on the board is the ATX 24 connector which only has two 12-volt wires which is you know you can deliver about 75 watts per wire well somebody found well it's conservatively per wire so supplying power to the graphics cards especially if you're gonna file to run a three graphics card can get a little dicey if they're all using that 75 Watts from the PCIe slot that's it that's a story it's a video for another day is what that is there's also a heat pipe connecting the chipset which I thought was a very pragmatic solution that runs up by the RAM connects to the vrm and then connects to the chunk of aluminum heatsink thing that's at the you know back of the thing the rear i/o shield which by the way the rear i/o shield is built in Nice jut like I said I'm inside did a really good job with the engineering on this one this time around this has the game Boost also known as the spinal tap knob it goes up to 11 so you can overclock with that although really like it does work you can overclock but like the 3700 X is so well Bend by AMD you're not gonna get much overclocking like it's it's not gonna go well for you the 3800 overclocks the best the 3900 it's hit-and-miss you're really better off doing the per core overclocking with the 3900 X because 3900 X has one good triplet and one kind of matte chip lit the match shifflett has been somewhere between a thirty six hundred and thirty six hundred X so it's pretty mad but the primary Chiclets the first Chiclets on the 3900 X it's pretty decent you can hit 4.5 gigahertz on it you know all core no problem but you're gonna be using rise and master to configure that so the the 1 to 11 thing let's call that reserved for future use in hoping that AMD will make the software for overclocking a little bit better in terms of other features of this motherboard it doesn't have a backplate or anything like that the back of the motherboard is actually quite clean which is good because something if I should have been putting heat producing components on the back of the motherboard which is a bit questionable in my opinion overall the motherboards pretty stable a Geekbench run just now on the 3,700 exit completely stock settings except for XMP is 52:21 and a 29 586 score although I just realized that that's not gonna work that's actually wrong because I'm only running one stick of our g.skill try didn't see royal now if I were building the system over again today I would be using the Trident z neo Stratton Zinio is the current stuff royal is kind of on its way out because it's been around for a while 3,600 3,600 is the sweet spot if you are having trouble hitting your boost clocks you might target 35:33 this particular 3700 X looks like it's gonna have no problem hitting 4.4 at least on two cores with 3600 but that hasn't been the case for every 3,600 3700 that I've tested so the overclocking is kind of weird if you have seen my other videos on ith to check that out we're just sticking to the motherboards here terms of Linux support Linux support is pretty good out of the box on these on the newer UEFI so you have great iommu separation all of your RAM twos each one is in their own group the PCI Express x16 x16 slots are in their own groups even the one serviced by the chipset the peripherals that are off of the the chipset some of the SATA some of the USB all of those are only in one immu group so like things that were like part of the legacy chipset on x4 70s like some USB some SATA that kind of thing all of that is in one immu group but anything that's interfacing directly to the CPU has been separated which is great because you can run vfi o on this pretty easily then and give you a virtual machine on Linux you know a dedicated nvme if you want dedicated USB in some cases because this thing has a lot of USB peripherals you can also do a PCI Express by one add-in card which i've got laying here somewhere and because those PCI Express by one slots go through the chipset you can get isolation for your add-in USB cards of course don't just add any USB card certain USB cards are better than others for iommu come to the level 1 forum if you're gonna do that and you're not sure what to do that that's doesn't really doesn't really hundred-percent belong in this video so final verdict good job in that side during the whole agiza debacle msi was one of the companies that was lagging behind in terms of like constant updates for the UEFI but we can't really blame the AIB partners for that because qualifying a UEFI is really a lot of work and so msi behind the scene asked him about it a mossad behind the scenes was doing a lot of work to make sure that the firmware for the processor from AMD was bug free and in a lot of cases it wasn't so not a lot of you know daily BIOS updates other motherboard vendors took the other strategy which is hey we're just gonna update it as soon as we get it from AMD which is also fine but that means the users are the guinea pigs so which do you prefer again like I say these are problems where it's like oh suddenly we have billions of dollars because our product is amazing and we need to hire more smart people to help us solve these problems before it gets out the door which is a good problem to have like I say the most revolutionary desktop consumer CPU probably 10 years good job AMD good job MSI putting it together thanks I'm Wendell this is level 1 this has been an a Meg x5 78 motherboard review oh it's plugged in whoops Oh Nothings are a little dark a little underexposed because I've already exposed the world of fries and 3000 we're gonna take a look at the msi meg x5 78 because if everything's not aces at spades right although that implies the spades are bad and aces are good but there's ace ace 'as of spades no really actually I think it's more like I think it's more like the episode of deep space 9 where like they've mined the wormhole and the the enemy is gonna come through the wormhole if you know they managed to take down the minefield and that would be bad and the enemies working on taking down the minefield and you know the resistance on the inside figures out how to prevent them from taking down the mine field and they succeed just a hair too late so like you know it's really suspenseful and it's like all the heroes are gonna definitely prevent them from taking down the minefield not so much no it's like Rahm was in there and he's like done Oh too late oh he doesn't know so yeah it's kind of like that AMD literally made this amazing amazing product and then there's some stumbles out the gate and frustration for everybody but I think you know still not as bad as the x99 launch probably not as bad as the X 2009 launch but you know who's keeping score I digress it's basically stabilized at this point although I don't know that I would advertise the rise in boost speeds and things like that I'm really doing a terrible job selling probably the most amazing processor in ten years I mean if you get excited about computer processors the rise in 3000 series is like the computer processor to get excited about at least until thread rapport 3 which is going to devour halt the entire high-end desktop market I think but yeah I mean it really is an amazing product and most of the troubles have really just been around polished and testing and integration and things that problems of scale it's like oh man now that I suddenly have billions upon billions of dollars I'm gonna have to hire people to manage the money oh I don't not even first of all problems I don't know what to call that that's basically what I'm talking about and if you if you've been living under a rock you have no idea I'm talking about don't worry about it it's basically fine everything's good the bad news is you are going to have to update your UEFI pretty much out the gate on all of these boards and the versions you're looking for at least as of the time of this videos 1.0 0.0 0.3 abb and that version actually buggy but it's not as buggy as the older versions so what happened was the older versions of the UEFI sand and stuff provided by AMD not the board partners so like MSI doesn't have anything to do with this and I'll have a lot of transparency into it the controversy is that the older versions would boost the higher clocks including the speeds printed on the box and so I've been running Geekbench while we've been talking and I can see that actually I did boost to 4.4 gigahertz on a few cores but most of the other cores were like 4.3 gigahertz and less so not the best situation Geekbench detects this as a 4.3 5 gigahertz processor it is in fact a 4.4 gigahertz processor around the box I did in fact hit 4.4 gigahertz with the one point 0.0 0.3 abb BIOS which just came out a day ago from the time that I'm filming this which is also the reason that some of our X 570 coverage has been delayed I'm gonna have to put that disclaimer in like all the AMD videos alright that's really gonna suck I don't why it doesn't know it's like the Deep Space 9 thing it really is so yeah anyway msi has done an amazing job engineering this board it is very solidly constructed it is very well laid out and especially like the PCI Express layout and cooling so with X 570 everything's PCI Express for PC Xbox 4 is gonna generate a lot of heat that means that the chipsets gonna get hot that means that you know other parts of the board potential are gonna get hot in this motherboard will happily support up to the 16 core 39 50 X 16 cores on a m4 that's crazy the PCI Express for SSDs also get quite hot so the layout here is really good we've got three PCI Express by 16 slots this is a by 16 by 0 by 4 or by 8 by 8 by 4 the layout here means that your primary x16 slot has enough room for a triple slot graphics card so any kind of graphics card that you're going to be running you're gonna have plenty of room for it to breathe the other the final very bottom x16 slot it's also PCI Express 4 it's serviced by the tip set the bottom in dot two on this motherboard the very bottom one is serviced by the CPU the two on top are serviced by the chipset that's kind of a weird situation at least I'm pretty sure that's how it is because that's how it is on the god-like so I'm pretty sure that's how it is on the ace in terms of layout and ferreting through LS top boat to get a layout of the system if I'm wrong about that this is also a really cool situation because of the fan placement this is one of the only boards the places the piece extras for chipset fan far away from the graphics card so if you've got a huge chunk a graphics card it is not in any way going to interfere with the airflow around the chipset although I think like in practice and testing that as long as you've got decent airflow in your case like the placement of the fan really didn't matter too much again it depends on your graphics card and some other parameters if there's hardly any airflow in your case then it would be a bad situation for you because the exhaust from your graphics card would go into the chipset but as long as you have front intake fans or front fans that are moving air not really an issue it's kind of a meme so in terms of connectivity at the back we've got our Wi-Fi six yes motherboards got into a Wi-Fi six and our ps2 keyboard port which is great for me because I've got a plurality a mix of USB three five gigabit and ten gigabit ports this motherboard actually has five ten gigabit USB ports one for the front type Siwan a rear type C and then the rest are type-a which is really pretty awesome we've got optical s/pdif and gold-plated audio connections on the relatively high end Realtek ALC 12:20 based audio codec that is implemented on this motherboard if you're into the RGB Ness it's got the Corsair header it's got digital headers it's got other RGB headers and it also has the msi ace like mirror infinity mirror thing and of course all of this is controlled by the msi mystic light software one thing I mentioned real quick on the chipset fan it is a zero frozer which means that it will turn off when the chipset is under a certain temperature threshold so if you think you might be annoyed by tiny little fan trying to move air well it does you have the option of setting it to turn off below a temperature threshold to zero frozer so depending on what BIOS you're running in some profiles you'll get that out of the box but you can also configure it in the UEFI for fan interfaces terms of power delivery duel will 8-pin you don't really need dual 8-pin especially on the am for CPUs that you're not gonna draw enough power to overload a single 8 pin connector that said some motherboards will actually use that interface the power interface for more than just the CPU because the only other source of 12 volts on the board is the ATX 24 connector which only has two 12-volt wires which is you know you can deliver about 75 watts per wire well somebody found well it's conservatively per wire so supplying power to the graphics cards especially if you're gonna file to run a three graphics card can get a little dicey if they're all using that 75 Watts from the PCIe slot that's it that's a story it's a video for another day is what that is there's also a heat pipe connecting the chipset which I thought was a very pragmatic solution that runs up by the RAM connects to the vrm and then connects to the chunk of aluminum heatsink thing that's at the you know back of the thing the rear i/o shield which by the way the rear i/o shield is built in Nice jut like I said I'm inside did a really good job with the engineering on this one this time around this has the game Boost also known as the spinal tap knob it goes up to 11 so you can overclock with that although really like it does work you can overclock but like the 3700 X is so well Bend by AMD you're not gonna get much overclocking like it's it's not gonna go well for you the 3800 overclocks the best the 3900 it's hit-and-miss you're really better off doing the per core overclocking with the 3900 X because 3900 X has one good triplet and one kind of matte chip lit the match shifflett has been somewhere between a thirty six hundred and thirty six hundred X so it's pretty mad but the primary Chiclets the first Chiclets on the 3900 X it's pretty decent you can hit 4.5 gigahertz on it you know all core no problem but you're gonna be using rise and master to configure that so the the 1 to 11 thing let's call that reserved for future use in hoping that AMD will make the software for overclocking a little bit better in terms of other features of this motherboard it doesn't have a backplate or anything like that the back of the motherboard is actually quite clean which is good because something if I should have been putting heat producing components on the back of the motherboard which is a bit questionable in my opinion overall the motherboards pretty stable a Geekbench run just now on the 3,700 exit completely stock settings except for XMP is 52:21 and a 29 586 score although I just realized that that's not gonna work that's actually wrong because I'm only running one stick of our g.skill try didn't see royal now if I were building the system over again today I would be using the Trident z neo Stratton Zinio is the current stuff royal is kind of on its way out because it's been around for a while 3,600 3,600 is the sweet spot if you are having trouble hitting your boost clocks you might target 35:33 this particular 3700 X looks like it's gonna have no problem hitting 4.4 at least on two cores with 3600 but that hasn't been the case for every 3,600 3700 that I've tested so the overclocking is kind of weird if you have seen my other videos on ith to check that out we're just sticking to the motherboards here terms of Linux support Linux support is pretty good out of the box on these on the newer UEFI so you have great iommu separation all of your RAM twos each one is in their own group the PCI Express x16 x16 slots are in their own groups even the one serviced by the chipset the peripherals that are off of the the chipset some of the SATA some of the USB all of those are only in one immu group so like things that were like part of the legacy chipset on x4 70s like some USB some SATA that kind of thing all of that is in one immu group but anything that's interfacing directly to the CPU has been separated which is great because you can run vfi o on this pretty easily then and give you a virtual machine on Linux you know a dedicated nvme if you want dedicated USB in some cases because this thing has a lot of USB peripherals you can also do a PCI Express by one add-in card which i've got laying here somewhere and because those PCI Express by one slots go through the chipset you can get isolation for your add-in USB cards of course don't just add any USB card certain USB cards are better than others for iommu come to the level 1 forum if you're gonna do that and you're not sure what to do that that's doesn't really doesn't really hundred-percent belong in this video so final verdict good job in that side during the whole agiza debacle msi was one of the companies that was lagging behind in terms of like constant updates for the UEFI but we can't really blame the AIB partners for that because qualifying a UEFI is really a lot of work and so msi behind the scene asked him about it a mossad behind the scenes was doing a lot of work to make sure that the firmware for the processor from AMD was bug free and in a lot of cases it wasn't so not a lot of you know daily BIOS updates other motherboard vendors took the other strategy which is hey we're just gonna update it as soon as we get it from AMD which is also fine but that means the users are the guinea pigs so which do you prefer again like I say these are problems where it's like oh suddenly we have billions of dollars because our product is amazing and we need to hire more smart people to help us solve these problems before it gets out the door which is a good problem to have like I say the most revolutionary desktop consumer CPU probably 10 years good job AMD good job MSI putting it together thanks I'm Wendell this is level 1 this has been an a Meg x5 78 motherboard review oh it's plugged in whoops Oh No\n"