The Sound Board

Just a quick tip for AMD Ryzen users. I am a fairly average user. I am not a tweaker, but I can find my way around a BIOS.

Anyway, I am working on a mockup with a large romantic orchestra. Lots of instruments playing at the same time, all with multiple mic positions. When playing back the tutti sections, I was getting pops and crackles from CPU overload, even with a 1024 buffer.

I wanted to increase CPU performance without going down the overclocking route. Lo and behold, there is a fairly simple thing you can do. I went into the BIOS and enabled XMP and PBO (precision boost overdrive). PBO is apparently a kind of automatic overclocking for Ryzen CPUS. All I did was enable these two settings and now my project runs smoothly even on a 512 buffer. I haven't measured the performance increase, but it's noticeable in DAW work.

Proceed with caution and at your own risk. Don't change anything in the BIOS if you don't understand what it does.

Thanks Linos - I know I have an XMP profile enabled, don't know about PBO. I'll take a look.

If I remember correctly, PBO was set to 'Auto' for me. I switched it to 'Enabled'. XMP was off.

If your PBO was set to 'off', let us know if switching it on made a noticeable difference.

Interesting!

First thing to say - I'm not getting any performance issues with my humble 7900. I ran a recent Cubase project - a bunch-o-synths and a bit of Kontakt - and the ASIO meter nearly went halfway at it's busiest.

I eventually found the PBO in the bias and turned it on. First thing I noticed - the fan on boot. I'm aware it spins up when active a bit, but this was clearly waaay faster rpm. The power meter I have strapped across it also went much higher than I've ever seen it - it never goes very near 200w normally, but here it way into the 200s. But honestly didn't especially perceive any difference in actual boot time.

Next to Cubase. It felt exactly the same. Perhaps this is not surprising - because it wasn't taxed before, there's no boost.

Finally I decided to do a check on Shutter Encoder, converting a mov file to mp4, knowing this taxes the PC. Holy moly, it sounded like Concorde - 280w, 380fps, video converted in 1m 20s. I then switched the bios back to compare with the normal mode. Result - 180w, 260fps but video converted in 1m 36s.

In short, for me, it's an awful lot more power and noise for not that much real world benefit, so I'm keeping it off. But there's no doubt its doing something, so if you are running near a limit then I can see this might well make things smoother.

Thank you for testing! That's interesting. I don't notice a louder fan on my project so far, and in everyday use my system is silent anyway. So there is not much of a tradeoff for me. I am not surprised that it's system dependent. As you write Guy, it's probably only worth trying if you need more performance.