All of AMD’s upcoming Ryzen processors will come with unlocked multipliers out of the box, which means that they are very overclock-friendly. This finding was first reported by the folks at PCWorld, who spoke to an unnamed AMD representative. But, there is a catch: not all AM4 motherboards will come with overclock support for Ryzen CPUs.
Most have also been wondering whether AMD’s 8-core 16-thread CPU will be the only Ryzen processor to be made available to consumers. Interestingly, according to the same source, AMD will be announcing more than one Ryzen CPU during its launch sometime in Q1 2017. Speaking of which, AMD’s Rob Hallock has mentioned that launching on the last day of Q1 2017 isn’t something that the company is looking to do. This means that we could be seeing Ryzen CPUs as early as February (or early March).
Getting back to the overclocking topic, it seems that every single consumer-based Ryzen CPU will be overclockable right out of the box. Not only will this be enticing for hardware enthusiasts, general consumers should benefit from it too, because overclocking means getting a performance boost out of one’s CPU, for free!
That said, only certain AM4-based motherboards will be able to support overclocking. These are the X370, X300 (mATX / Mini-ITX), and B350 series of motherboards, with the former two being the only motherboards to come with CrossFire and SLI support. Despite this, AMD motherboards tend to be priced slightly lower compared to Intel’s, so consumers need not worry too much about spending tons of money on them.
(Source: PCWorld, TechPowerUp)
