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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

I think number one is definitely wrong. Recent inquiry led reviewers to discover not all boards are created equal. While differences aren't drastic on some boards you can't reach boost clock written on the box.

https://youtu.be/o2SzF3IiMaE

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I think this is more a problem to do with motherboard manufacturers than AMD. The manufacturers decide which boards get a Ryzen 3000 stamp of approval, and BIOS support. Though maybe AMD should have been more stringent about their motherboard requirements regarding forwards compatibility with Ryzen 3000.

Even if there were more serious issues, I would argue that AMD did the right thing keeping the AM4 socket. Since this varies from board to board, it's obviously not a deficit of the socket itself. At the end of the day, nobody is forcing you to keep your old motherboard. You just have the option to. If you can save 25% by not buying a new motherboard, it probably justifies a small performance deficit.

On most motherboards you can't reach the boost clock written on the box. The handful which can seem to be more an exception than the rule, and even most of the motherboards specifically designed for the current generation of AMD CPUs can't do it. The ones which can are generally quite expensive, though not all of the expensive boards achieve this - in fact, some of them seem to be worse than their cheaper counterparts from the same manufacturer!

Reaching max boost clock could just mean some boards boosting for a nanosecond to 4.5 Ghz and then immediately dropping back, and others keeping a lower but stable clock. Aren't average clocks more important?

I think that's the point. Most cores don't ever reach advertised boost clocks by default (let alone exceed the boost clocks as was advertised in AMD's commercial explaining PBO). It seems you need to manually overclock via trial and error each core, and even then, you won't get overclocks on all cores.

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