It's now official, AMD has confirmed that the upcoming Ryzen 5800X3D will not support overclocking of its core frequency. Memory tweaking and infinity fabric overclocking will still be possible, which is where most of the gains with Ryzen CPUs are found anyway, but it's a shame that enthusiasts won't be able to push this chip higher than its (reduced) 4.5GHz boost clock.
AMD's 5800X3D is an intriguing halo product. It's a standard 5800X with 64MB of extra L3 cache bolted on top of it, and a lower boost and base clock. It's still eight cores and 16 threads, with the standard 105W TDP of the 5800X, but gaming performance is said to be 15% higher than that of a 5900X, which would put this chip ahead of the 12900K in some games, and potentially even rival the performance of a 5900X.
The reduced boost clock was sad to see though, and something overclockers were hoping they could lift up themselves. That won't be possible, though, as AMD has confirmed the rumors that the 5800X3D will not be overclockable in any traditional sense.
Although this did leave some to wonder whether this was AMD's way to prevent the 5800X3D from competing with upcoming Zen 4 CPUs, AMD has now made it clear that there's a good reason this new chip won't be overclockable -- it's already running at its voltage limit. Where standard Ryzen CPUs can occasionally jump in VCore to 1.4 or even 1.5v for short periods of time, the new VCache system can only safely run at up to 1.3V or 1.35V. It already does that with its stock frequencies, so pushing them any higher would risk damaging the chip.
So overclocking is disabled.
With memory and infinity fabric tweaking still possible, though, overclockers will still be able to push this chip beyond stock when it debuts on April 20 for $450.