AMD Ryzen 3 5300G APU Overclocked to 5.5 GHz, Smashing Quad-Core Records
The little quad-core that could, actually can
An AMD Ryzen 3 5300G APU has been put through its paces with a little help from an exotic liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling solution, which has helped it on its way towards breaking overclocking records after renowned South Korean overclocker Safedisk pushed the Zen 3-powered quad-core chip up to 5.5 GHz. The resulting benchmarks took the top of the list for quad-core chips in several benchmarks even though some competing Intel chips were overclocked up to 7 GHz.
Considering that the chip's base frequency is set at 4 GHz, the 1.5 GHz overclock corresponds to a 37.5% higher operating frequency compared to AMD's base specs, which takes us back to the old days - you know, when overclocking was fun and mostly worthwhile.
The overclocking workbench featured an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme motherboard paired with 2x 8 GB of G.Skill's Ripjaws V DDR4-2066 (CL14-14-14-28-1T) memory - the slower memory speed puts a lesser strain on the 5300G's Infinity Fabric, which facilitates higher operating frequencies. The overclocked chip was then put through its paces in several benchmarks, albeit with differing maximum clockspeeds. At this level of overclocking, system stability sometimes depends on the applications being run.
As such, the Ryzen 3 5300G managed to clear Y-Cruncher with a 5.4 GHz overclock in a mere 53 sec & 681ms - beating the previous quad-core record-holder, the Core i7-7740X, clocked at 6.4 GHz. Additionally, the Ryzen 3 5300G was able to push through Geekbench at its highest overclock of 5.2 GHz, achieving a new world record of 32,200 points - around 2% faster than the previous record. The final tested workload was GPUPU 1B, in which the Ryzen APU posted a score of 2min, 2sec, 651 ms at the top 5.52 GHz frequency - more than a minute faster than the Core i7-7740X running at over 7 GHz.
Powered by the Cezanne architecture, the quad-core Ryzen 3 5300G APU hasn't been released to the mainstream DIY market — recent semiconductor supply difficulties mean that AMD is prioritizing higher-margin products for the retail, professional, and high-performance computing channels, and have only released the Zen 3 and Vega-powered APU to system integrators.
AMD might actually have a winner in its hands if it ever released it for the DIY market, however - one needs only consider the expected retail pricing of such an APU, which we'd place it around the $110 and $130 mark, alongside the recent sales numbers from Germany's Mindfactory, which has already shown that AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G are already outselling the Ryzen 7 5800X and And Ryzen 5 5600X on German soil.
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Francisco Pires is a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware with a soft side for quantum computing.