MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi Mini ITX Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 5.5Ghz @ 55x multiplier.

There are several ways to overclock an AMD Ryzen processor.  The first is manually where you can sync all of the cores together, assign a voltage and hope things stay cool enough to attain your goal.  The second way is one where you individually “boost” the already boosted cores in the CPU to increase performance while also keeping heat production in check.  This can be difficult to do from the UEFI/BIOS but, is something you can do from the Ryzen Master software or, from the BIOS if you want to go insane.

MSI does offer some assistance in this realm and, to be honest, I am not entirely sure how the secret sauce is mixed to enable this overclock. 

To help with overall performance the memory profile setting was enabled and the overall frequency was bumped to 6800Mt/s,  These aren’t the fastest modules I have in the lab but I find there to be a diminishing return after a certain frequency so I’ll take stability over frequency anytime.

Auto overclocking is not something I typically endorse but, by enabling the PBO (Precision Boost Override) I was able to hit 5.5Ghz stable with an interesting mix of performance across the benchmarking suite.  Some benchmarks showed a sizeable boost while others where identical or even regressed.  What is interesting is that I had been able to run this system at 5.4Ghz using some manual tweaks and actually got higher scores but, the system would fail during Aida64.  It didn’t matter what I did, the benchmark would fail which makes the entire overclock fail.

Thing is, most CPU overclocks are not all that beneficial and often cause more trouble than they are worth.  Most of them just increase a couple cores which can boost desktop responsiveness but does nothing for games and the PBO boost here likely just alters the boost curve allowing certain workloads to speed up while others have already been boosted to the max.

If you settle on the default CPU boost features combined with quality memory you will get plenty of performance out of the box leaving the mythos of overclocking performance gains to be a stark reminder that tuning a gaming build is not effortless and boring.