For many years, AMD has been the underdog in the semiconductor industry. Starting out as a licensed chip manufacturer for giants like Intel, it wasn’t a household name in Silicon Valley for a long time.
It began producing its own chips later on, but its first big break came in 2003, when it introduced the first x86 64 chip, beating Intel to market. Since then, it has made some progress and begun to offer buyers some competitive AMD processor options.
Intel and AMD have a cross-licensing agreement under which Intel allows AMD to manufacture x86 CPUs and AMD allows Intel to use its x86 64 instruction set. Smaller fabrication processes are critical for CPUs because they allow manufacturers to pack more performance into the same space while consuming less power.
Intel has failed to offer processors made with smaller fabrication processes in recent years. As a result, AMD has begun to gain market share with its CPUs, particularly the Ryzen line.
While AMD’s processor lineup is much more streamlined than Intel’s, you may still require assistance in understanding its offerings and selecting the best AMD CPU for you.
Table of Contents
Tips to Enhance the Performance of Your Amd Processor
1: Know your CPU
You must decide on two things before you begin overclocking the CPU. First off, check to see if your CPU can even be overclocked. The manufacturer’s website (which would be AMD or Intel) typically has this information, however as a general rule, almost all AMD CPUs can be overclocked while only Intel CPUs with the letters K or X at the end can be overclocked.
The chipset here matters, so you’ll also need a motherboard that supports overclocking. Since 2017, AMD motherboards with the B or X prefix have been officially supported for overclocking. With a motherboard that doesn’t officially enable overclocking, it’s not impossible, but your alternatives are much more restricted.
2: Update your BIOS on a regular basis
Due to the small but real possibility of unplugging your hardware, we usually advise most PC users to ignore motherboard BIOS updates unless they need to add a specific new feature. Ryzen is not one of them. Because Ryzen’s AM4 platform is still so new, BIOS updates from motherboard manufacturers are coming in thick and fast.
Revisions released in the early months significantly improved the speed, stability, and available features for AMD systems. You should definitely stay up to date during Ryzen’s early days. To be safe, make a backup of your existing UEFI BIOS to a flash drive before proceeding.
3: RAMming rate
Ryzen responds heavily to memory speeds, according to early studies, especially when it comes to gaming applications (where Ryzen’s performance can occasionally be weaker than that of Intel chips).
However, different motherboards allow various memory speeds, and it’s possible that your BIOS isn’t set up to get the optimum performance right out of the box. You should be able to manually overclock your RAM if your motherboard doesn’t come with preloaded profiles and settings for the memory kit you’ve chosen.
The “AMD Generic Encapsulated System Architecture” (AGESA) 1.0.0.6 upgrade that began coming out in May fixed the major memory troubles for AM4 motherboards, however Ryzen initially experienced serious problems with memory overclocking.
Numerous new memory performance features and enhancements are included in the BIOS updates it made possible. With the ability to overclock RAM to 4000MHz in steps of 133MT/s and without altering the system’s reference clock, a much wider range of overclocked speeds is now possible.
4: By Overclocking the Processor
You can run your processor at greater clock speeds than what was intended through overclocking. This enables you to complete resource-intensive tasks more quickly and easily, including gaming or video or photo processing. Overclocking generally makes your machine feel faster.
Your processor’s speed is determined by two factors: clock speed and CPU core ratio. Overclocking raises the clock speed, increasing the number of cycles your CPU executes per second (measured in GHz). Each cycle produces an electrical pulse, or “clock signal,” which instructs the CPU’s integrated circuits to process data.
5: Temperatures and Voltages which are safe
To give your PC the best thermal performance possible, we recommend using a can of compressed air and a cloth to clean out all the dust while wearing an antistatic bracelet. Avoid using a vacuum because it can generate dangerous static electricity and is ineffective at cleaning dust from filters, fans, and coolers.
Your CPU’s model and quality are both related to voltage. Regardless of chip quality, the great majority of CPUs from a certain generation will have a same safe voltage limit.
You may find estimations for the voltage ranges required to achieve overclocks within each frequency range in the table above, but you shouldn’t assume your CPU is safe just because it is at or below that level of voltage. We emphasize that it is challenging to predict the long-term effects of increasing the voltage on any CPU.
6: Increasing the CPU multiplier
The multiplier should be increased first to increase the clock speed. This method makes use of the motherboard’s base clock (typically 100 MHz) — multiplying that number yields your clock speed. A multiplier of 36 (x100 MHz) yields 3.6 GHz.
Increase the multiplier one step at a time. This is usually accomplished by typing in the number or by pressing the + key on the keyboard. Proceed slowly and consider this an iterative process. Increase the speed of your computer.
If everything goes well, go back and turn it up even more. Begin by increasing the multiplier for one core and gradually progress to the others. The more cores you overclock, the hotter it becomes.
7: Install Windows thoroughly
When building a new PC, many PC builders install Windows cleanly, but if you don’t, you should! When using a fresh copy of Windows installed directly on a Ryzen system as opposed to using a pre-existing Windows image built on an Intel-based machine, AMD told PCWorld that performance was somewhat improved. However, we haven’t tried it out ourselves. In a somewhat similar matter, you prefer Windows 10 to Windows 7.
While Windows 7 will undoubtedly install and function on Ryzen processors, neither AMD nor Microsoft will provide updates or drivers for the older operating system, so all those essential platform updates that are undoubtedly on their way won’t ever be made available for Windows 7. Microsoft, in fact, actively prevents Ryzen systems running Windows 7 or 8 from receiving Windows updates. AMD’s processors also support Linux.
Conclusion
Everyone wants their laptop to be faster and more powerful. You’ll obtain a higher performance system that operates more quickly and smoothly if you have a more powerful CPU.
Entry-level CPUs are adequate if you’re only using your laptop for simple chores like web browsing and word processing, but you’ll need more power if you want to play games or edit videos on it or if your present system bogs down while you’re running multiple programs simultaneously.
The most powerful CPUs right now cost the most money, but they’re also the most powerful. By overclocking your CPU and thinking about spending extra money on more RAM and a good graphics card, you can get the most out of your budget.
