Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) is an opportunistic automated overclocking mechanism found in various AMD processors that pushes the system power budget beyond its rated specifications in order to allow Precision Boost to act more aggressively and achieve higher performance. As with all other overclocking mechanisms, using this feature voids warranty.

Overview

PBO is an extension to AMD's normal Precision Boost that offers an alternative overclocking solution to manual overclocking by automatically bumping the SoC power budget when possible in order to give Precision Boost more headroom to act more aggressively, thereby achieving higher performance. PBO opportunistically increases the chip power budget by sensing SoC information (such as power, current, voltage, temperature) as well as motherboard subsystem VRM configuration and modifying that info in order to further push the performance.

PBO is capable of raising the following limits:

• Package Power Tracking or Platform Power Threshold (PPT) - the power delivery to SoC
• Thermal Design Current (TDC) - sustained current deliverable from motherboard design
• Electric Design Current (EDC) - peak current deliverable from VRMs during transient

After raising the limits mentioned above, Precision Boost is given more headroom to act more aggressively. Due to Precision Boost granularity, both single-core and multi-core performance benefits. Unlike manual overclocking that might require non-ideal frequencies for all cores in order to get better performance, Precision Boost can dynamically overclock single-thread or a few cores higher than when more cores or all cores are active.

Support Processors

PBO was officially introduced with the launch of 2nd-generation Threadripper processors.

See also

• AMD frequency behavior