Ryzen 5 1600 with Stock Wraith Spire Cooler

Introduction

Recently I just purchased a Gigabyte GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 motherboard from Amazon together with a Ryzen 5 1600 (with Wraith Spire Cooler included). I’m not very impressed with the Gigabyte Apps (for Windows) that come with the product and their ability to overclock the CPU, so I downloaded the Ryzen Master Utility application from AMD’s site.

This article is about the performance with the stock (comes with the CPU) Wraith Spire Cooler and how to perform some basic overclocking.

Wraith Spire Cooler

I’ll have to hand it to AMD for their marketing strategy, all the advertising for Ryzen is great! Good logos and good name. They paid attention with the cooler as well, as the Wraith Spire Cooler is an improvement over the standard coolers that AMD typically uses. The new Wraith Spire Cooler is round and bigger than a fist, and heavy. See the image below for an idea of what it looks like.

The one thing to keep in mind, is that this is an air cooler, and it won’t compare at all to a water cooler.

Ryzen Master Utility

I definitely recommend downloading a copy of the Ryzen Master Utility and use it to take your CPU and cooler out for a ride. You should also get CPU-Z and Prime95 for verifying your overclocking and the stability (more on this later).

Once you start up the Ryzen Master Utility application, you’ll get a warning about voiding the warranty of your CPU if you go beyond the limits. Just say “OK” and enjoy! You will then see how the CPU is running currently at the time, and this depends on what was setup in your BIOS and possibly any motherboard apps that are running on the OS. The default is shown by the capital letter “C” on the bottom left of the user interface.

To overclock, click on one of the profiles, like the number “1” just besides “C”; then click on the up arrow besides “Core 1”. Click “Apply” from the menu on the top. I was able to overclock to 3925 MHz using the Ryzen Master application as per the screenshot below.

On the left there is also a temperature measurement, which is a realtime update of the CPU core temperature. This is useful to monitor when you are running your tests. NOTE: This may not be very accurate. I noticed discrepancies between this temperature and the Gigabyte Apps hardware monitor utilities.

CPU-Z

Now you can start CPU-Z and then verify indeed your changes have taken effect. Below is a screenshot of CPU-Z running against my configuration.

You can then click on the “Bench” tab of CPU-Z, and then select a Ryzen processor from the drop down list and then click “Bench CPU” to run a benchmark against your CPU. You can click “Submit” afterwards to submit the run to CPU-Z’s website.

When running the benchmark, you are simply comparing to expected results. If you get greater than 100%, then you are doing well. This doesn’t mean your setup is stable.

Prime95

To verify overall stability, you’ll want to run Prime95 for at least 6 hours in the default “torture” test, and as long as it runs that long, you are probably good with the configuration for a long time. In Prime95 select “Options > Torture test…” and then select “Blend” and continue to run for a long time.

I was able to increase my overclocking using Ryzen Master Utility up to 4025 MHz, however after running for about 10 minutes in torture test with Prime95, the PC crashed. This means that 4025 MHz is too high for my setup.

I wonder how my older Noctua NH-U12P SE2 cooler will do in comparison?

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