It’s official: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D does not support overclocking

AMD’s Robert Hallock confirms Ryzen 7 5800X3D does not support overclocking

During an interview with HotHardware AMD’s Director of Technical Marketing confirmed that the first Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache won’t support traditional overclocking.

The CPU has a hard lock for overclocking. This means that users will not be able to adjust the frequency or the voltage, but it will be possible to adjust Infinity Fabric and DRAM clocks that will improve performance. However, the CPU will not support overclocking by a standard definition.

Hallock further explained that the CPU voltage does not scale above 1.35V. This field still needs optimization and the 5800X3D being the first part with the large L3 cache placed right on top of the 8-core chiplet has not been optimized for overclocking. Rather than wait for this technology to mature, AMD decided to roll out the first 3D V-Cache part for gamers to try, even though it has not been prepared for overclockers.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and boost of 4.5 GHz. This means that the CPU is 400 and 200 MHz slower than the original Ryzen 7 5800X respectively. However, due to the 3D V-Cache the CPU will be much better in gaming (AMD claims up to 15% better performance on average than Ryzen 9 5900X).

Furthermore, lack of overclocking for 5800X3D does not rule out AMD intention to disable this functionality for future CPUs. On the contrary, once AMD overcomes the scaling problem, the overclocking will be enabled for future SKUs with similar type of cache.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D launches on April 20th at 449 USD. It will compete directly in gaming with Intel Core i9-12900KS which should launch by the end of this month.