Hey all,
For reference, this is on a MSI Gaming Pro Carbon X370 (BIOS: 7A32v14) with a 1700 and 2x8GB of Trident Z RGB @3200MHz.
I've been having abnormal performance in a few games, so I was tweaking things in my system yesterday to try and compensate. Biggest one was in Warframe, game would randomly dip down into ~40fps territory but it didn't seem like the system was being overly stressed. One core would get pushed to 100% and the rest would just kinda sit there. I honestly chalk a lot of it up to the game itself as it's never been the best optimized, but I still wanted to do something about it.
So, feeling frustrated, I decided to tweak things in the bios a bit to see if it would help because why not. Before I got there, I finally pay attention to the big red button in the upper right corner. Says Game Boost. ...Fuck it, click the button, restart. Much better performance in games. Problem areas in Warframe mentioned earlier practically nonexistent (still dips below 60, but more akin to 55 rather than 40.)
Best I can tell, it bumped my base clock up to 3.4GHz, but I don't see much else beyond that. I wouldn't figure a .4GHz clock bump would help that much, so I'm guessing Game Boost did something else as well. Does anyone have an idea of the full scope of what the Game Boost button controls?
EDIT: Fixed some fat-fingering of numbers.
EDIT2: I think a lot of my issues were based around Cool and Quiet, now that I think about it. System was never particularly stressed, but when I put together my Ryzen system, I never thought to disable it. Game Boost appears to disable that as well as apply a 400MHz upclock, so that would explain my performance increase a bit more.
Check it out
http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/12612442/fs/12612367
On my 1600x it bumps up the base clock +400mhz-so up to 4ghz. But it also bumps up the voltage wayyyy too high as well. Another thing it does is remove the cool and quite feature and runs the CPU fan at max speed which makes the system loud. Stress testing was not stable FYI. But then again my chip doesn't like 4 Ghz when I manually OC'd so that could be it.
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Not all AM4 motherboards support Ryzen 7000 series CPUs without a BIOS update. Here's the breakdown:
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A520 boards: No Ryzen 7000 support
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On my motherboard (gigabyte gaming x370 gaming k7) it has a utility called game booster, which when opened shows all your current running processes. You can click on one and then press "optimize". I dont know if this actually helps, so if any of you have used it please tell me your results.
no
Usually for low end systems it may have some impact where the cpu is already maxed out and where that extra couple frames makes a world of difference. But for most modern systems when you are already getting decent framerates then the total perceptible impact is going to be negligable.