So you can oveclock with a cheap AMD A520 chipset motherboard after all
Last week AMD launched their budget A520 chipset for motherboards. You can run all modern Ryzen processors on it while the chipset is a bit more restricted, one of these restrictions is the lack of ability to overclock. Well, that's not 100% the truth at it seems, you can tweak.
Be advised though A520 motherboards will have very poor VRM designs not ready for tweaking. A specific Gigabyte motherboard at the very least allows overclocking. This concerns the A520M-H, which was tested with earlier f1 firmware. In the video below you can observe a Ryzen 5 3600 is boosted to 4389 MHz on all cores. The base clock was increased to 108 MHz, with a CPU clock ratio of 40.50.
It is not known whether this is also possible on other motherboards, or whether it only concerns this specific model. The source also used an older firmware version, so there is also a chance that Gigabyte has terminated this loophole again with an update. Regardlessly of how interesting you fins tweaking to be ... it might be worth to check out.
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If I got an A520, I don't think I'd even attempt overclocking it.
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As much as I like "free" performance, not really sure how beefy those VRMs on those a520 boards, plus most of them aren't cooled by anything. Or at least that was the case with A320, it's been waaaaay too long since I checked one of those out.
With that out of the way... I have a feeling AMD will take action soon, similar to what happened with the a320 overclocking.
And on a more personal note, Yeah, if I'm planning on overclocking, I would definitely go with x*70, whether it's 570, 470, 370. Maybe 550, 450. But really, never a320 or a520
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Depends on the processor. Something like a 3000G, 3100 or 3300X should be just fine. I wouldn't try it with a 3600 or higher though.
If you manage to push power delivery to the point of damaging those VRMs, you shouldn't be overclocking to begin with. Or building systems for that matter.... Most VRMs run well below their thermal limits and if the case has problem air flow, will be just fine with a reasonable overclock. Stick to the processors that A520 is really meant for, and overclocking adds little risk to the VRMs....
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Good point - and those are the kinds of CPUs that people buying such a board would likely end up getting.
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On other hand, before AMD forbiden it, the A320 were able to do it too (same with the A300 using the X300 bios on barebone and laptop).