Less than a day after AMD set a launch date for its Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the CPU and GPU maker shared some slightly surprising news regarding the CPU. For the first time since the launch of the brand five years ago, the 5800X3D will not support CPU overclocking.
The news was confirmed by Robert Hallock, Director of Technical Marketing, AMD, during a livestream interview with Hot Hardware. According to Hallock, users will be unable to overclock the CPU frequency, with the processor being hardware on a physical level, but there is a good and logical explanation to its decision.
As it turns out, the voltage of the 3D V-Cache is limited to just 1.3V and 1.35V, which also explains why the base and boost clock of the 5800X3D seems lower than the standard 5800X. However, Hallock did confirm that the Infinity Fabric and memory bus can still be manually overclocked.
The good news is that Hallock also confirmed that this limitation on the 5800X3D is a one-off application; because the technology used to construct the 3D V-Cache chiplet for CPU is limited by today’s manufacturing technology, AMD had no choice but to implement the hard lock on it. Therefore, any and all future Ryzen CPUs will still be overclockable.
