CS VI Hero with R7 1700 @4Ghz + Load line calibration (LLC) = Frustration!

[antony209494]

OK lets take things from the start: When I first got the board and I was on the first released BIOS update I used to be able to get a perfectly stable 4Ghz with just a manual setting of 1.375 VCore, no LLC or any other settings. The problem was that my RAM didn't work at 3200Mhz so I updated to the next BIOS releases as they came by. Somewhere along the way an update rendered my OC with these settings unstable and I had to start using LLC. And my question is: Is LLC even useful on this board? I've tried every setting from 2 to 5 and the only thing it does is blast the chip with unnecessary Vcore while NOT doing what it is actually supposed to do and that is preventing Vdroops. This results in random crashes while gaming or even while browsing with WHEA Uncorrectable errors indicating insufficient voltage. No matter the LLC setting Vcore drops as low as 1.330-1.350 which IS NOT enough to sustain 4Ghz on my chip.

Just check out the screenshot below. This is with 1.375 and LLC 4! And it still drops as low as 1.330. This is not acceptable! Not even momentarily! Before you rush in and tell me "Oh this is normal - you don't understand how this works blah blah" I am gonna say that it crashes only during low CPU usage scenarios ie when browsing or on non cpu demanding games (like resident evil revelations 2 which crashed just yesterday with the above 1.375-LLC4 settings. When stress testing with AIDA of prime95, even with LLC 3 it gets through hours of testing with no problem and dozens of successful Cinebench runs as well. So the problem is low usage scenarios where LLC is not doing it's job properly. So yea it is NOT normal that it thinks it can drop that low even in low usage scenarios since it still crashes!

I know for a fact that 1.373 is enough to maintain my OC on all load levels. Even with 1.375 and LLC 5 sometimes Vcore drops below 1.373 momentarily and although it hasn't crashed yet with this setting it blasts the chip with voltages as high as 1.43 and under no circumstances I want it going above 1.4 since it is not only potentially damaging but also unnecessary.

So I am looking for a way to get rid of the Vdroops, without unnecessary overvoltage. There should be a way to set an absolutely stable Vcore that doesn't fluctuate at all. Like I set a 1.375 and it stays pegged at 1.373 at all times no matter the load. I am now gonna try something like 1.39 with LLC 2 but I am 99% sure its gonna have the same drops. No matter what I do I it seems can't get rid of them. Perhaps ASUS needs to look into LLC on this board and improve it in a future BIOS.

Sorry for the long post. I wanted to provide as many details as possible to make it clear what the problem is.

[fultotop]

I've found that if I try to overclock my Crosshair after a while nothing works even my stable settings, it will still crash. I think something in the bios settings get stuck somewhere with the incorrect setting. I found that a cold boot sometimes fixes the issue or hit the bios reset at the back and set up the bios again, that seems to work every time for me.

The software your using to test your Ryzen is not good way to stress it I've found Handbrake will crash my Ryzen when processing a large h264 2 pass file using slow encode, within a hour or two. AIDA64, Cinebench, Prime95 and most games will run fine at the same settings, so don't believe it's 100% stable using synthetic tests use a real workload.

Also your voltages are exactly in the same range as my Ryzen at 4Ghz with the same highs and lows, I use 1.3875V LLC3 100%.

[lightknightrr]

And what kind of thermal management setups do you guys have?

[fultotop]

lightknightrr wrote:
And what kind of thermal management setups do you guys have?

I have NZXT Kraken X62, pulling air out of the top of the case through the rad, plus two 180mm fans at front pulling in air, one at the back pushing air outward.

It seems the LLC's just mess up after changing the settings a few times, also they don't really seem to affect the v drupe until you put them on extreme and then the temps go crazy.

PS. I've also had other glitches with my board as well, OC mode not enabled while clocked to 4GHZ it was still using XFR up to 4070. Shame that glitch disappeared when I updated to BIOS 3008. I actually thought that was a feature, a post with screenshots is in this forum.