AMD tweaks Ryzen 3000 specs page after users claim advertised boost clocks aren’t possible

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There have been some curious goings-on over on AMD’s official landing pages for its Ryzen 3000 series, all of which appears to stem from users being unable to hit the advertised boost clock speeds with their new Ryzen 3000 processors.

Yesterday, AMD updated the specifications for its range of AMD Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 3000 CPUs, adding an addendum to each of their ‘Max Boost Clock’ speeds specifying the “Max Boost Clock is the maximum single-core frequency at which the processor is capable of operating under nominal conditions.” Previous Ryzen CPUs could achieve the advertised boost clock speeds across all cores. 

Since then, AMD has reverted to how the page always looked.

Controversy is now bubbling up on Reddit in regards to what exactly are “nominal conditions” and just why are so many users struggling to reach these stated clock speeds. Are we talking about water cooling? LN2? We don’t really know, but if you’re going to advertise it you’ve probably going to have to back it up.

There are also question marks over whether this should specifically be advertised as single-core performance and, indeed, whether the boost clock info really provides us with any useful data at all. 

Starting with the nominal conditions, this is about as vague as it gets. When a boost clock speed is slapped on a CPU box I think we all probably presume the average person buying this CPU should be able to see at least a single core hitting this clock speed at some point. We would also assume the bundled in Wraith coolers should be enough to achieve this feat, provided they’ve been put into a well-ventilated system that’s not sat in the Sahara desert. 

A larger number of Ryzen 3000 owners have already reported this isn’t the case though, and there have also been several in-depth investigations. Tom’s Hardware, for one, discovered just one core on its Ryzen 5 3600X CPU could hit the advertised 4.4 GHz boost clock. The rest aren’t falling far short (50-100MHz) but they’re falling short all the same. Crucially, the Ryzen 3000 CPUs are achieving the boost clocks on a single core, whereas 1st Gen Ryzen and Ryzen 2000 could hit all-core boost clocks.

It isn’t exactly anything new for all-core boost clocks to be significantly lower than single-core boost clocks, that’s just the way it works, but customers are probably expecting all of those cores to at least be capable of hitting the advertised speeds on an individual basis at some point.

So, have we got any Ryzen 3000 owners out there who can chip in? Is anyone struggling to hit the advertised boost clock speeds for AMD’s latest CPUs? Let us know below!