Overclocking
We have overclocked the old-fashioned way by installing a 1.35V under-load voltage and then raising the all-core multiplier until the platform can no longer complete the Blender test.
The 2920X managed to hit an all-core 4.1GHz whilst the 2970WX managed a tad less, at 4GHz.
You may be wondering why the Cinebench score for the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is barely any higher than the stock speed, while there's very decent improvement for the 2970WX.
The answer rests with the out-of-the-box all-core speed, determined by what is known as the PPT (CPU) power supplied by the platform.
Our analysis shows that, at stock, the 2920X runs at about 3.9GHz and 1.2875V before it reaches that 180W TDP threshold - figures that are close to our overclocked results. The 2970WX, meanwhile, scales to 3.475GHz and 1.1875V before it hits the default 250W, and this is the figure where it is deliberately limited by the motherboard. Having twice the number of cores has a direct impact on the power requirement, of course.
Being able to crank out another 15 per cent all-core frequency pays obvious dividends in multi-core benchmarks. Putting it another way, we can bypass the power limit (2970WX) for extra performance but cannot do much about absolute top-end frequency (2920X).
