Yup, working well!
I had gone to -30 purely for the lower heat aspect. I was on a Noctua D15 G2 when I originally built but have since switched to a 420mm aio.
I’ve enabled the Tighter Mem Efficiency preset on my Tomahawk. Ram is Dominator Titanium Hynix A Die. The Vengeance kit I had in before was M Die and didn’t like the Efficiency mode.
Did two flights yesterday in the S6S Coyote and Cows DA40 and yeah, smooth, stable flying. Will do some more in sim testing tonight.
I was crazy sad when my 7800x3D feels like it will burn soon, msfs2020 times. Found this video https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FaOYYHNGlLs and i never changed anything till this day. I was loosing only 1fps at msfs2020 LICJ tests, my temps was 55-60 max stress, from 90+ to 55-60C was crazy.
Right, so he is undervolting by 20 or 30 “units” (each unit is 3-5 mV, the amount is managed by the PBO2 algorithm). If you undervolt too far, you may find some instability, and lose some performance - some cores will have less room to undervolt, and become unstable or “clock stretch” (skipping cycles) starving for voltage… So if you back off on the undervolt a bit, you might actually find better performance.
Also, that’s just temperatures. There is an equally simple way to possibly improve MSFS performance with EXPO and subtimings. Screenshot from the video you linked shows:
He has EXPO enabled - assuming your RAM is on your motherboard’s compatible list, you should make sure EXPO is on, and shows the speeds matching your RAM
If you have EXPO on, then try enabling EXPO / XMP High Bandwidth Support - this tightens memory subtimings (a profile on the motherboard or taken from the RAM itself) and greatly improves MSFS… but you have to test. If unstable, just undo it. But I gained litterally 25% performance that way.
If your RAM is 6000 speed like his, then:
set Infinity Fabric to 2000 MHz
set UCLK DIV1 Mode to UCLK = MEMCLK
The part about PBO is already in the first post. Or do you mean something else? Maybe you were trying to show how to set up PBO on Gigabyte boards, since the first post of this thread explains it using MSI motherboards as an example?
Maybe you changed your motherboard?
PBO settings also depend on the CPU cooler you’re using. You can also use a Vcore offset instead of PBO.
But if your CPU is running fine now and staying cooler, that’s what matters most 
If you were running -30 before, then that’s pretty much overdoing it - it’s no surprise it wasn’t fully stable.
That’s exactly why I mentioned in my first post in this thread that PBO -15 is kind of the sweet spot. Glad to see it seems to be working out the same way in your case too
If someone is using air cooling instead of an AIO, it actually makes sense to set a CPU temperature limit in that case.
Let’s say you cap it so that in games it doesn’t go over ~85C. On motherboards for AMD processors, this is handled by the “Platform Thermal Throttle Limit”.
MSI BIOS > Overclocking > Advanced CPU Configuration > AMD Overclocking > Precission Boost Overdrive (PBO)
Gigabyte BIOS
Tweaker > Precision Boost Overdrive > Platform Thermal Throttle Limit Ctrl (set to manual)
After changing Platform Thermal Throttle Limit Ctrl from Auto to Manual, a new option appears below:
Platform Thermal Throttle Limit
with an input field to enter the desired temperature.
ASUS BIOS
AI Tweaker > Precision Boost Overdrive > Platform Thermal Throttle Limit (set to manual).
After changing Platform Thermal Throttle Limit from Auto to Manual, a new option appears below:
Platform Thermal Throttle Limit
with an input field to enter the desired temperature.
ASRock BIOS
OC Tweaker > Platform Thermal Throttle Limit(TjMax)
You can set it up so that once the CPU hits that temperature, the motherboard automatically starts reducing power and CPU clock speed to keep it around the target of 85C.
Of course, this comes with some performance trade-off, but in gaming you usually won’t notice a huge difference.
It’s also worth remembering that settings like max FPS in MSFS or GPU drivers exist for a reason - for example locking to 60FPS can significantly reduce overall PC temperatures.
EDIT
@DrewmorKuZy
You might want to consider switching from Ryzen 7 7800X3D to Ryzen 7 9800X3D - it’s faster and generally better.
On top of that, its temperature while gaming MSFS 2020, which you mentioned, can be even around 10-12C lower, so the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is noticeably cooler than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/ryzen-7-9850x3d-6-faster-than-9800x3d-the-world-s-best-gaming-cpu-tests-comparisons-and-rumors/755705/110?u=tenpatrol
Thanks a lot TenPatrol, GimbalAxis. Have a great day guys <3
Your comment actually reminded me that there are still users running air cooling even with high-end Ryzen CPUs.
I didn’t mention it in my first post, so I’ll edit it and add a note about using the Platform Thermal Throttle Limit if temperatures remain too high even after configuring PBO.
Thanks for the reminder.
7950X3D here. Dark Rock Pro 4 air cooler. No problem with temps - generally 60-65°C during sim use. Only hits my manually set 85°C Platform Thermal Throttle Limit (in PBO settings) running Prime95 or similar test.
Yes Air on my 7950X. However at the end of the day I did not OC because of rare crashes. BTW, the 7950X is a bit of an anomaly. I must have been one of the first users. I bought if for another purpose (astrophotography) and eventually added the 5080 to play the game. It is NOT recognized as compatible with the Quest 3 according to Meta and this results in instability with the Q3 and certain hacks to keep it going.
I have the Asus X670E-a along with my 9800X3D and have been setting my thermal limit to 85 degress for quite some time now. However I do not set it in the AI Tweaker menu and recommend setting it in the Overclocking menu along with all my other OC settings.
Advanced/AMD Overclocking/Precision Boost Overdrive/Platform Thermal Throttle Limit
For basic changes, AI Tweaker is enough. For more advanced settings, use the Advanced menu. Good that you mentioned the Advanced tab.
Thanks for adding the screenshot - I’ve added a quote along with your screenshot to the first post in the thread.
Made the mistake of not buying a X3D amd cpu. wanted to make the most of my 14th gen 14600k.
i5-14600k @ OC 5.7 ghz @ 1.39v (idk how much oc helped) . OC on all cores. tubro off.
LLC 4900
Ram - G.skill 4400mhz 19-26-26-42 downclocked and tightined to 3600mhz 16-20-20-38 - hynix c die
Rtx 3070 Fe oem edition card oc @ 2100 mhz.
tuning the timmings on my ram and forcing Gear 1, and CR1 along with downclocking(since my ram cant do beyond 3800mhz in cr1) made a big difference.Also turned down ram refresh cycle from 771 to 520 and dram trf from 14150 → 32767 Got a 10-20 fps jump.
Ram latency down from 79ns to 61ns(i can go lower i guess) and bandwith up from 50000 to 55800
At lax i went from 30 fps on ground to 38 fps and gpu utlization hitting 75% in a pmdg 737-800 and from 45 fps on approach to 65 fps in one instance and around 55-60 fps on approach in clear weather with Object detail at 200 and LOD at 150
at paris cdg i went from 30 fps on ground to 38 fps outside cockpit and 35 fps in the cockpit of a PMDG 777 F gpu utlization hit 99% and gpu vram usage hit 7900 or 8000 mbs aka 8gb
I still get main thread limit some times but most like 99% of my bottleneck has shifted from cpu to the gpu. I have seen way higher gpu vram utilization and gpu utilization.
Ram timmings and subtimmings tuning and cpu load line tuning(level 7 zero or nil vdrop) seems more important than anything else. For once i am getting gpu limit error in developer mode.
After years of playing this game and trying to optimize it, i seem to have hit my gpus limit for once. i was able to match zen4 (5800x3D, 7700x3D) level of perf on my 24mb small cache 14600k. zen 4 counter parts have around 96 mb v3d cache whereas i have just 24mb of normal L3 cache.
TL:DR ; if you are on Intel 13th or 14th gen tune your ram or if building a new system either buy a X3D cpu like the 5800x3d(for ddr4) or 7700x3d(entry level ddr5).
I can say that this is also true on AMD. I found quite by accident that tightening memory subtimings made a huge difference. And it makes sense when you realize how much data MSFS loads in to RAM, VRAM, moving around between CPU and GPU.
Here’s a screen shot I took a while back with HWInfo showing CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, etc compared between various benchmark tools and MSFS. Note the bottom 3 graphs are RAM, VRAM and Virtual Memory, and see how much is going on with MSFS.
Just for grins I ran that on this laptop.
83759.56 MB/s
Surprised me a bit.
I’ll test my gaming rig later today. I’m curious.
That is excellent. Can you let us know what memory you have installed, speed, timings?
Thanks
I am waiting for the 9600x3d to drop or zen6 to test this out.
I am not a “tweaker” like many simmers are. As an AMD simmer, both CPU and GPU, the only thing I do in my AMD software is limit FPS to 60 which, for me at least is more than enough to run a flightsim, but then double it using Lossless Scaling from Steam.
HOWEVER, I was having issues with my AMD CPU running extremely hot, in the 95C range even with a very good air cooler. This only happened with MSFS2020. I updated my MSI motherboard’s BIOS, leaving the new install at default settings, and the CPU now runs much cooler. So I urge anyone running MSFS on a fairly current PC to make sure they have the latest Motherboard drivers as I was really surprised what a difference it made for my CPU not overheating.
Dell XPS 16 9640 Laptop
Intel Core Ultra 7 Core 155 (16-core, 3800 MHz)
16GB LPDDR5x RAM (9600 MT/s)
My big regret when I bought this laptop was not getting the 32GB version. RAM is soldered on the MOBO and cannot be upgraded. Fortunately, I’ve never exceeded 90% utilization with any of the apps I run on it.
Well, that explains it. Thanks for letting us know.
So I ran ‘winsat mem’ on my system but the prompt window disappears right after the test starts. Any ideas?
I run it from a open cmd prompt running as administrator and it stays open for me.
