After briefly showing off the EVGA X570 Dark, Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido has taken the motherboard for a spin. The famous overclocker pushed the Ryzen 3 5300G's FCLK up to 2,433 MHz under liquid nitrogen (LN2).
The EVGA X570 Dark is a premium motherboard that's tailored toward extreme overclocking enthusiasts. We don't doubt that the engineers have added some optimizations for memory overclocking. That's not to discredit AMD's Ryzen 5000G (Cezanne) processors, which have become the favorite toys for overclockers.
Lucido had the Ryzen 3 5300G was running at 5.5 GHz with its FCLK to 2,433 MHz. In a 1:1 ratio with the memory clock, this means that the Ryzen 3 5300G can exploit DDR4-4866 memory without any latency penalizations. The overclocker didn't settle for sloppy timings, either. He tightened the timings all the way down to 14-13-12-21 (1T).
It's clear that the EVGA X570 Dark motherboard can handle a high FCLK, though at the end of the day, your mileage will vary, depending on your APU's IMC. Aaron Bakaitis, another overclocker, claimed that he got his FCLK up to 2,550 MHz or DDR4-5100 without breaking the 1:1 ratio.
The really good Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) samples typically peak at a 2,000 MHz FCLK (DDR4-4000) so the Ryzen 5000G's 2,550 MHz (DDR4-5100) is a big feat. Naturally, APUs benefit from fast memory, but they also target entry-level gamers so it's unlikely that someone would blow tons of money on a memory kit.
Lucido said in his Facebook post that the EVGA X570 Dark motherboard is ready, insinuating that it will arrive very soon to compete with tbe best Z590 overclocking motherboards. There's still no word on the pricing. Given the price tags on previous Dark motherboards, it wouldn't surprise us one bit if the X570 Dark carries a price tag in the $500 range.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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-Fran- One counterpoint: the beauty of the APUs, specially looking at the 5600G and 5700G is that the CPU element still benefits a lot from faster RAM, as the whole uArch is tied to the IF speeds. So faster RAM will still yield better performance all-around.Reply
If you're building for budget, absolutely agree.
Regards. -
Alvar "Miles" Udell He used Geekbench 3, 2 versions out of date, no doubt to put as little stress on it as possible. Not impressed.Reply -
taz-nz ReplyYuka said:One counterpoint: the beauty of the APUs, specially looking at the 5600G and 5700G is that the CPU element still benefits a lot from faster RAM, as the whole uArch is tied to the IF speeds. So faster RAM will still yield better performance all-around.
The catch is 5300G,5600G & 5700G only have 16MB L3 cache, so a lot of the gains from faster memory are going to be lost to the performance deficit caused by the lower cache memory, when compare to the 5600X or 5800X.
It would be interest to see what speed ram you need to run to bring the 5700G to performance parity with the 5800X running DDR4-3200.
Outside of setting overclocking records, I doubt there will be any real justification to go beyond DDR4-3600 CL16 with the 5600G & 5700G. The cost vs benefit will just not make sense unless you get hardcore into overclock cheap memory kits.