1. What Is Overclocking?
Overclocking increases the clock speeds of your processor (measured in Megahertz or Gigahertz) beyond what its advertised specifications are. Dialing up the clock speeds makes your CPU work faster, and that, in turn, improves performance. A CPU needs to be unlocked before you can overclock, and all AMD Ryzen processors come unlocked by default. Intel, by comparison, unlocks only specific SKUs of its processors.

These days, a CPU overclock can show improvements in general performance and can also improve performance for CPU-intensive work. As for gaming, it may or may not improve your experience, depending on how heavily your favorite games rely on the GPU.

All CPUs have at least two advertised clock speeds: the base clock and the boost clock. The base clock is the fastest speed at which the CPU will run for light- and medium-intensity computing tasks. The boost is how much higher it can crank up the speeds when under a heavy load, such as when gaming or video editing is taking place. Going beyond the boost speed is the goal of any overclock.

If we look at the Ryzen 5 2600 (the CPU we’ll be using as an example in this article), we can see on AMD’s site that it has a base clock of 3.4GHz and a maximum boost clock of 3.9GHz. If we were looking at Intel processors, these measures would be called the “processor base frequency” and the “maximum turbo frequency.”

What You’ll Need

Using Ryzen Master is very different from using a traditional overclock that’s set in the BIOS. With Ryzen Master, if you reboot the PC, the overclock is wiped out and the CPU returns to its default settings. Not to fear, however, as activating the overclock again is as simple as a button click. The advantage of this is that you can set your PC to overclock for gaming or other intensive tasks, and then return it to stock settings the rest of the time to avoid wear and tear on your parts.

Before overclocking a Ryzen CPU, there are a few things you’ll need. First, a reliable power supply unit (PSU) with more wattage than what you typically need in a non-overclocked state. A Corsair recommends in a blog post that a power supply should meet your power needs while staying somewhere within 50 to 80 percent of the PSU’s rated wattage. You can estimate your PC’s power consumption using PC Part Picker. Next, you’ll need something better than the Wraith cooler that came with your Ryzen processor. Overclocking creates more heat, requiring something beefier, such as an all-in-one liquid cooler with dual fans, or an aftermarket fan with a serious heatsink.

You’ll also need a Ryzen processor, of course (as this won’t work with Intel CPUs), and the Ryzen Master software, which you can download from AMD’s website. Our example overclock uses a standard Ryzen 5 2600 desktop CPU, but this can also work with Ryzen desktop APUs that have integrated GPUs. In fact, Ryzen Master can even let you overclock your integrated GPU, but that’s an adventure for another time.

Let’s also download a few more useful pieces of free software: Asus Realbench, Cinebench, Core Temp, and OCCT. These are for benchmarking the CPU and monitoring its temperatures.

The last thing you’ll need is some patience. Going through an overclock, even an easy one with Ryzen Master, is slow going. The basic idea we’re shooting for with this overclock is a moderately faster CPU that’s stable and draws as little power as possible.