[Ryzen 9 9950x] Three weeks of BIOS changes and 1000 reboots later... my final score.
Just wanted to post my results and some general observations and questions, if anyone wanted to give some feedback on some theoretical questions about RAM speed and Ryzen 9 processors.. Oh, and even though my SSD speeds are good enough and it won't make the tiniest bit of difference when it comes to real world performance, if anyone knows how I could improve my peak benchmark speeds, I'd be interested to know.
ASUS ROG Crosshair Hero X870e
AMD Ryzen 9 9950x
Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5 2 x 48GB 6400Mhz (96GB Total)
MP700 Pro Gen 5 SSD (12,400MB/sec) x 2 in RAID 0
I built a workstation purely for the work I do. I honestly feel like the 9950x was made for me. It's been fantastic at for what I wanted it for. I understand, it's not for everyone. It's no where near the best gaming CPU and it's expensive. But, I don't even have a graphics card in this machine. The fact that I now have integrated graphics that are actually quite impressive for just being on-chip was a wonderful bonus. My last machine I had to pick a cheap GTX 1650 just so I could run multiple monitors.. With USB to HDMI, I can run multiple monitors off this machine just fine, even at high-res using the 40gbps ports.
Anyway... I saw/read a bunch of reviews talking about the 9950 out-the-box multicore benchmarks in, say, R23 being around 41,000 points. Which is pretty awesome in itself. I was getting around those scores as well.
After MUCH tweaking, learning about infinity fabric and RAM speeds, undervolting, curve optimiser and setting my thermal limits.. it took a lot of reboots! But I finally cracked 47,000 points with NO overclocking whatsoever.
I recon I could go higher with actual overclocking, but I'm totally happy with this result.
Couple of weird issues with all this though. Firstly, I really wanted to underclock my memory so that I could try and get a 1:1 ratio with the infinity fabric, however, I can't get it stable at all. Second, I can't find any better timings than the ones I have at the moment. It doesn't seem to affect performance, as I'm obviously getting excellent benchmarks, but I really wonder if I could find memory timings that are stable and I also wonder what would happen if I could get a 1:1 ratio..
Cpu-z says my current ratio is something really weird like 1:33 ? Which doesn't sound exactly ideal..
The other crazy thing is.. even though I'm running RAID-0 using the motherboard RAID array controller, it seems like my SSD speeds are tied completely to the speed of my processor. So, I'm running 2 x MP700 Pro Gen 5 SSDs.. I've been down a 2 week rabbit hole trying to work out my motherboard claims of GEN5 PCIe lanes, it can run 1 x SSD at Gen 5 speed, then it does some super weird bifurcation, despite the fact I don't have a graphics card. So, my SSD Read Speed is supposed to be 12GB/s. The best I've gotten in RAID-0 in 3 weeks of changing every setting that exists related to PCIe lane speed, splitting, bifurcation, forced Gen type etc. is 15GB/s total.
I've seen RAID0 better speeds if Windows is running the RAID array.. although, its a bit late for me to want to format everything and try that out. Maybe one day, if everything goes horribly wrong, I can give Windows control of the RAID array and see what the results are.
As you can see from the picture of the max speeds of the RAID0 2 x GEN5 SSDs when everything is not running optimally, speeds completel tank down to 1.7GB/s across the board.. and I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why that is.. ?!
In order to get both SSDs running full speed on Gen 5 Pcie lanes without splitting or sharing. Apart from waiting 5 years until gen 5 is standard everywhere, then the only motherboard capable of doing this today, as far as I'm aware, is the MSI Godlike - a mere snip at around £1,300 GBP (about $1,600 in freedom dollars) .... for a motherboard..
