[Editor’s Note: After publishing this story, an AMD representative contacted us via email, pointing out that the 5000 WX-series is actually unlocked for overclocking, contrary to the statements below. The company also provided a link to public documents about Threadripper 5000 WX that states, in part, " Select WRX80 motherboards from our ODM partners will support both memory and CPU overclocking for users looking to push the limits of their workstation even further.” The original story follows below.]
Last month, master overclocker and YouTuber SkatterBencher put up a video showcasing an eye-watering 4.6 to 4.8GHz all-core overclock on a Zen 3 64-core engineering sample featuring an unlocked multiplier for overclocking. With overclocking officially disabled on AMD's production Ryzen Threadripper 5000WX Pro CPUs, this will be one of the only times we'll ever see what AMD's Zen 3 silicon can accomplish on the HEDT platform.
SkatterBench's video is quite detailed, with a runtime of almost an hour to showcase five different ways to overclock this 64-core CPU, including a mix of PBO tuning, the use of AMD's Curve Optimizer, and manual overclocking. Cooling was achieved with a custom loop, so no exotic cooling was used like liquid nitrogen.
To extract the eye-watering 4.8GHz overclock, SkatterBencher used a full manual overclock with per-CCX frequency tuning and tuned for specific benchmark applications only instead of targeting a completely stable CPU overclocking.
With this in mind, the overclock was achieved in 3DMark, with CCD4 being the highest quality silicon in the chip and reaching an amazing 4.825GHz on those four cores in the CCD. The rest of the core clusters could not hit 4.8GHz, but they were able to get close with a combination of either 4.6GHz or 4.7GHz.
The 3DMark scores reflect the incredibly high core clocks well, with a whopping 32,950 points on the CPU core alone. This puts the prototype chip miles ahead of the record-holding score on the 3DMark website, with a score of 27,202 points.
It's a shame AMD did not unlock its production-ready Ryzen Threadripper 5000 Pro CPUs with overclocking support. Compared to the previous generation, Threadripper 5000 has a noticeable bump in frequency headroom. With Ryzen 3000 Threadripper, if you wanted to get close to 4.8GHz, you would need to use exotic cooling such as liquid nitrogen.
