Wolfenstein Youngblood follows in the same footsteps as its three predecessors that sucessfully revived the series in 2009. Having liked Wolfenstein, The New Order and The New Colossus I thought that sharing that kind of game with a friend in Coop would be even better. This is the first installement in this series that allows you to do that and I’m a big fan of Coop gameplay. And by Coop I mean playing the regular campaign with a fellow gamer, not some unrelated multiplayer map or basic PvP action. I want to experience the story with somebody, have a ton of fun and discuss the game while playing it.
Recently I set out to figure out how much clock speed I can squeeze out of my Zen+ based Ryzen 5 2600. To make life easier I figured I use Ryzen Master so I can change the settings while I’m in Windows so I don’t have to reboot every time I increase the clock speed. This has worked nicely until the point where I figured the viable maximum was. The next step was to dial those numbers "into hardware", meaning setting the options in the BIOS so that Ryzen Master is not required any more. And this is where my issues started to appear.
The Error
First, here’s a screenshot of the message Ryzen Master was giving me. After that I’ll explain what had happened.
In order to set the CPU multiplier you have to change from automatic to manual mode in Ryzen Master. I wanted to reset all options to their defaults after setting the overclock in the BIOS, but I always kept getting the message that Ryzen Master wants to restart Windows because the setting was changed to "Manual" – which it wasn’t, but more on that later. So I did as it asked multiple times with the same outcome every time. Effectively, I was doing a boot
loop manually.
So, how did I get there?
The Journey
In brief:
Find a stable overclock in Windows using Ryzen Master.
Reboot to BIOS and set the overclock closer to the hardware.
Reboot to Windows and reset everything in Ryzen Master.
Manual "Boot Loop" a few times.
Notice CPU always at 4GHz, no more Cool’n’Quiet operation mode.
Undo overclock in BIOS.
Still see overclock in Windows.
Uninstalling Ryzen Master.
Still see overclock in Windows.
Ryzen Master still not resetting.
Manual "Boot Loop" a few more times.
Getting pissed and searching the Internet – apparantly I was not alone.
More reboots and tests with BIOS settings.
The Fix
It was the frickin’ BIOS! Ryzen Master was not to blame.
I have an ASRock B450 Gaming mITX mainboard with the latest non-Matisse (Ryzen 3000) BIOS. It is not recommended to upgrade unless a Ryzen 3000 is installed. There’s a weird bug in the BIOS that still applies the overclock even if the setting is set to "Auto by AMD CBS" (or something like that). There were two things that helped:
Load BIOS defaults.
Enable manual control and set the correct CPU base frequency at 3400MHz.
When applying the overclock with 4000MHz it effectly ran at 4GHz every time, even in idle. When setting 3400MHz it properly clocked down and also boosted as a R5 2600 should. The same setting only with a different clock value produced a different behavior. And unless the BIOS defaults are loaded the "Auto" mode doesn’t do what you expect – if you’ve set an overclock previously.
Curiously enough, booting Fedora Linux from an USB stick did properly scale the CPU frequency based on the load, even with the overclock applied. Apparently only Windows or AMD’s drivers didn’t manage to do that. Booting a Linux helped me to rule out Ryzen Master as the root of the always applied overclock although the BIOS setting was set to the default Auto mode.
The takeaways:
Don’t overclock on this mainboard.
The OC options for the CPU are laughable at best. No way to set the multiplier per core.
Next time buy a higher-end mainboard for overclocking (ITX is expensive though…).
The Codeslinger 