The chip will almost certainly throttle to the 3.2GHz baseline when it is thermally limited, and from there Precision Boost will try increase the clock speed in increments of 25MHz to find a good balance between performance and power consumption. Straight away, one thing is made clear – if you run an R7 1800X with a crappy cooling solution, you’re in for a bad time. AMD considers the default power state of the R7 1800X to be 3.2GHz rather than its base speed of 3.6GHz, while the second power state is the 2.2GHz minimum. The clock speed now drops to 3.2GHz to save on power, until the benchmark completes its run and the processor idles at 2.2GHz. This carries on through the imaginary benchmark until the cooling solution on the chip is no longer able to keep it at a decent temperature. As the chip heats up and more cores get loaded up, the clock speed drops to 3.7GHz, before lowering again to the chip’s base clock of 3.6GHz.

As the benchmark carries on, those two cores boost to 4.1GHz using XFR, but only briefly.

You start at the maximum boost clock, because thermals are still good and power draw isn’t very high with only two active cores. If you imagine it as an actual graph showing performance over time in a heavy benchmark with a stock cooler attached, it makes a lot of sense. In AMD’s Ryzen press deck, there’s a slide detailing how a typical R7 1800X will move through the motions of managing its clockspeed for a given workload. Precison Boost and Extended Frequency range go hand-in-hand But there’s one thing in particular that might sway your purchasing decision when deciding which Ryzen processor to buy, and that’s how its boost modes work in comparison to Intel’s Kaby Lake, Skylake, and Broadwell-E families.

AMD’s new Ryzen processors went on sale earlier this month, and it comes with a brand new platform, DDR4 memory support, and a lot of new I/O connectivity options for power users to “um” and “aah” over when making their purchase. If you’re reading this article eager to find out more about how AMD’s Precision Boost and XFR technology affects its performance, I guarantee that you’ve come to the right place.

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