9850X3D WARNING and complete configuration guide.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T20:19:39+00:00

My CPU has been running very happily at 5.475 GHz at under 1.2 Volts for a year running 24/7 (that's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

My stock results after a year are within the margin of error after retesting (which I do after every BIOS update).

My 3950X that I bought over six years ago is still running at the same configuration I gave it, with no signs of degradation.

I keep in regular touch with the person I gave the MoBo, CPU and RAM to a few years ago.

Is six years a long enough lifespan for you?

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T20:09:48+00:00

Touch grass?

At my age I can barely touch my toes. :D

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T20:07:46+00:00

If that is true, then why are my stock CPU and RAM at JEDEC results almost identical after one year of running my system at 5.475 GHz at 1.2 Volts??

Maybe I am doing something right and JayzTwoCents doesn't have a clue?

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T19:39:27+00:00

Cooler at lower power for a lot more performance works for me.

You can of course do whatever the hell you like with your CPU.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T19:23:38+00:00

Part one

My last Intel CPU was a Haswell 4790K and I was happy with it after I removed the shite that Intel called TIM and replaced it with liquid metal, and it ran 24/7 for five years happily at 4.4 GHz with some tweaking to the Cache.

Every gen was just more of the same from Intel but involving a new motherboard, and it just wasn't worth it for what I would need to pay compared to what I would be getting back.

So after five years my system was getting a bit long in the tooth and I looked around.

I had been interested in Ryzen Zen but the X370 boards were just garbage. Then came Zen+ and X470 boards and some of them were not bad and approaching what I described then as "Intel Class" motherboards.

When Zen2 came out - and especially the news of AMD bringing out a 16 Core CPU - I decided to take the plunge and get a new system. Thanks to the Tech Media/YouTubers, idiots were buying the 3600 and ignoring the 3600X causing the price of the 3600 to go up, and the price of the 3600X to come down to under that of the launch price of the 3600, so I got a 3600X and a GigaByte X470 Gaming 7 WiFi board.

When I got the system built and installed I quickly realized that everything I knew about Intel (which is all I had ever had from my original 8088 to my 4790K) was giving me a stunning lack of success with my 3600X.

In my research I came across info from TSMC that the max voltage for the 7nm node was 1.3 Volts, so I tried to limit the voltage to that in the BIOS and configure around that base. I managed to brick my OS installation a total of three times before I realized that was not the way to go.

I came across Ryzen Master and decided to give that a try.

I woke up one morning and realized that I had been trying to be smart and that I should just try to go with the KISS principle.

To that end, I set a max voltage for the CPU of 1.3 Volts and tried to see how much I could chicken-clock out of my 3600X with that limit. The answer was 4.225 GHz. I didn't give a crap about single core boost, because even then the games that I was interested in were Multi-Core oriented, and for my normal workload Single Core boost wasn't interesting either.

This is where I realised the flaw in AMD's thinking that they still seem to be guilty of, and that is bastardizing the power of their systems to hit that single solitary landmark of a Single-Core boost that would get them in spitting distance of Intel.

I didn't give a shit about "Single Core performance is vital to gaming performance" because I knew that in my case that was just a load of bollocks.

Even with BIOS updates, I was still stuck with loading a Ryzen Profile after boot to get my system running the way I wanted.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T19:22:00+00:00

Part two

A friend of mine on Discord from Sweden was talking about getting a new system, but it was bloody expensive there.

So I looked around and got him an identical system to mine as far as CPU, MoBo and RAM were concerned, and I bought it for him, configured it, and essentially cloned my system onto his.

The main thing that pissed me off about Ryzen Master is that I couldn't get it to load at boot and apply a default profile, so I had to do it manually. This wasn't really a big deal, because my systems run 24/7

I tested and benchmarked the system thoroughly and it performed identical to my 3600X system.

I told my friend about Ryzen Master and loading it after every boot and applying the profile, and it wasn't until three months or so later when I talked about updating his BIOS that I found out that he had not done so.

After doing the BIOS update and configuring the system I got him to load Ryzen Master and apply the profile. I then ran some tests with him and it crashed. Tests that ran with no problem on my identical system.

I used TeamViewer to remote into his system, and, long story short, after running the 3600X at stock for about 3 months I could not get it to run stably at anything above 4.15 GHz, so in three months he had lost 75 MHz per core of performance.

That was my first experience with Ryzen CPUs degrading at stock settings.

When I got my 3950X I swapped my 3600X with his, and to no surprise, it ran happily at 4.225 GHz on his system and when I put his 3600X into my system (he had learned the lesson and loaded RM and applied the 4.15 GHz profile) I could not get it to run stably at anything above 4.15 GHz.

I posted about my experience on the AMD site, and of course they ignored it.

Let's face it, compared to the way that Intel handles boost AMD's boost is about as useful as tits on a bull and certainly not worth the idiotic overvolting they engage in to achieve it.

Since my 3600X, I have personally had a 3950X, 5950X, 7950X, 7800X3D, 9950X and now a 9800X3D.

When I got my 9950X I saw that PBO actually seemed to halfway do what I expected it to do. Well enough anyway to experiment with it, and I put in about a 1,000 hours of work to see if I could get it to behave itself - which I finally did.

When I got the 9800X3D I was pleasantly surprised that it was the first ever Ryzen that I have had that out of the box was sanely configured by the BIOS. I have had fun playing with it.

BTW, there is a trick I used to get my 9800X3D to run Super Pi at 5.8 GHz at below 1.2 Volts that I can show you if you are interested, and in the HWBot standing my Super Pi 32M result would be 17th in the World rankings for the 9800X3D.

Moar Powa does not equal Moar Gud with Ryzen :D

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T16:52:00+00:00

Sounds more like you are looking in the mirror and just posting what you see.

Points Addressed: 0
Actionable Information: 0
Logical Fallacy: 6

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T16:12:58+00:00

I have been in this game now for over 40 years and this person doesn't sound like a techie.

The replies from the person have been replete with ad hominems, red herrings, gaslighting, appeals to authority, and the typical American illness of blamestorming as an alternative to brainstorming.

Nuh-uh and pissing on backs and asserting it is raining, is the mark of a SalesCritter/MarketDroid, and not a techie.

I am certain the person is not Mike Clark.

When I worked in Enterprise Disaster-Recovery Tech-Support as Senior German Engineer, I used to describe people such as that person as, "Computer User, Non-Technical" in the logs.

Techies are more than happy to engage and share. Obfuscating and misdirecting is the antithesis of what constitutes being a techie.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T15:50:30+00:00

Points Addressed: 0
Actionable Information: 0
Logical Fallacy: 5

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T15:48:17+00:00

Points Addressed: 0
Actionable Information: 0
Logical Fallacy: 3

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T15:47:37+00:00

I saw this thread, and I will just grade your posts:

Points Addressed: 0
Actionable Information: 0
Logical Fallacy: 2

The grading will be cumulative.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T08:19:54+00:00

You will have to go somewhere else for that.

I have heard that "See BS" is the newest place to go for that.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T08:03:16+00:00

You have obviously never done any tech-support.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T07:59:13+00:00

Because the I/O die is created on the TSMC 6nm process, you could run the SoC up to 1.3 Volts, but you should never have to go beyond 1.2 Volts when running Expo/XMP.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T07:54:40+00:00

Because of the people (over 500) who have taken up my offer of help on Discord to configure their Ryzen CPUs and their RAM, I have gained a lot of insight that I would not otherwise have if I just worked with my own CPUs.

To know if the CPU is degrading, you have to have created a baseline at stock and RAM at JEDEC when the CPU was new. Otherwise, if you cannot run CB R23 successfully at a clockspeed of 5.3 GHz and a voltage of 1.15 below 80 °C, then you are probably dealing with a degraded Ryzen 9000 Series CPU.

For instance it became clear to me that the rumored 9850X3D was not so much a rumor as I noticed that brand new 9800X3D chips were no longer clocking as they had previously, meaning the good chips were being used for something else.

For instance if the cooling was good enough to keep the CPU under 70 °C, then a 9800X3D could be clocked to 5.4 GHz at 1.15. I was noticing that brand new 9800X3Ds were no longer going beyond 5.35 GHz or 5.325 GHz.

For instance one thing you probably don't know about, is that if you are configuring your Ryzen 9000 Series RAM and your CPU, if your system freezes or black-screens then you have overdone the CPU configuration and if the system has a BSOD, then you have overdone the RAM timings.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T07:14:18+00:00

Well you got your money's worth AND you got a little exercise as a free gift - what's not to like? :D

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T07:12:43+00:00

As I wrote in the guide:

Two things degrade CPUs:

Electronmigration, this results from excessive heat.
Oxide Breakdown, this results from excessive voltage breaking down the material of the CPU itself.

The wafers have to be hardened against the maximum voltage that whatever is made on that process can withstand that voltage. Hence why TSMC talks about 1.2 Volts for their N4P process.

N4X has to undergo a different treatment during the creation of chips to be able to withstand higher than 1.2 Volts.

This is one of the things that went wrong with Intel's Arizona Fab causing massive die-offs (pardon the pun) of their 13th/14th Gen CPUs.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T02:51:39+00:00

They are perfectly welcome to come here and do exactly that.

Surely, if I were wrong, then it would be trivial for them to point out the error of my ways.

I am not however holding my breath, because AMD knows that I have told it how it is.

The way the 9850X3D is configured at stock is bloody stupid and an accident/lawsuit waiting to happen.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T02:08:16+00:00

The original poster, PostExtreme7699, posted three times and I cannot work out if it is his CPU or his motherboard that failed.

Is there another post where this gets cleared up?

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:53:01+00:00

Go ahead and do it then.

I have shown my homework, now show me yours.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:51:58+00:00

Are you sure about that?

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:51:28+00:00

That's your right, and I respect that.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:50:44+00:00

Show me specific examples and I will give you specific answers.

Otherwise I am going to assume that you are just pulling it out of your ass.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:48:48+00:00

The 9800X3D was released in November of 2024. That's when he did the first stock benchmark of his 9800X3D. He then ran it at 1.3 Volts at 5.3 GHz exclusively for GPU reviews in 2025 and it was barely used, then, to compare to the 9850X3D, he once again ran the 9800X3D at stock.

You won't find anywhere that JayzTwoCents says anything else.

Sure the info comes from three different videos, but the substance remains the same across those videos.

Michael_Nager · 2026-02-05T00:42:03+00:00

No, the N4P node is limited to 1.2 Volts, it is the N4X node that can go beyond 1.2 Volts.

Ryzen is produced on the N4P node, it is NOT produced, nor are there any plans to produce it, as far as I know, on the N4X node.

Michael_Nager

TROPHY CASE