Sorry, Ryzen 9 7950X doesn't hit 6.3 GHz

If you’re lucky enough to own an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, you may have noticed that the normally fast chip seems to run at near-record-breaking boost speeds. Unfortunately you can’t really get that much performance out of the chip.

The Ryzen 9 7950X is one of the best processors with a boost clock speed of 5.7 GHz and is already blindingly fast. According to friends at Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab)some users found that when a PC running the chip wakes from sleep, the processor’s clock speed jumps to 6.28 GHz.

Unfortunately, these near-record-breaking clock speeds are too good to be true.It looks like AMD chips have been hit with a RTC (Real Time Clock) reporting bug. This makes the chip appear to be running significantly faster than it actually is.

Luckily, unlike many Windows 11 bugs and serious security issues with AMD chips, the RTC bug doesn’t break anything or impact performance as far as anyone can tell. . Whether you’re using the best Intel processors or AMD processors, you can pretty much work it out.

So about those benchmarks…

One thing about RTC bugs is that benchmarking tools rely on RTC to determine how certain components such as processors and graphics cards are scored. That’s why the RTC report exists. The problem, however, is that RTC bugs can lower benchmark scores in tools like CineBench that users and reviewers use to test their systems.

Benchmarking is an important way to demonstrate that your system is properly assembled and integrated, so it’s especially important if you’re building your own PC. This latest RTC report bug of his shows why it’s important not to rely on a single test to determine a system’s performance.

When I benchmark my components, I try to measure their performance using different tools and usage scenarios. Especially since it can cause problems with certain tests. All synthetic processor benchmarks take into account the clock speed given by the RTC, but gaming benchmarks don’t take it into account at all. So if the processor is misreporting his 6.28 GHz boost clock, expect this to translate into a decidedly higher FPS. If you have a powerful graphics card, play the game on lower settings and 1080p resolution.

If these numbers don’t match up with that expectation, then there’s strong evidence that something might be wrong somewhere in the way you put it all together. Please use the test. Then you don’t have to worry about RTC bugs preventing build optimizations.