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iCue with Ryzen 3950x Causing boost issues


Haydn

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Since building my new system running a Ryzen 3950x I've been fiddling with the bios settings desperately trying to understand why my system was scoring so much less in benchmarks than others systems. My main issue was pretty clear that the cpu would boost all cores to around 4.2ghz when doing single threaded benchmarks, rather than going for 4.7 on at least one core and scaling across the rest of the cores.

 

After some trial and error I figured maybe it was the 4% cpu usage when idle on the desktop that was causing some sort of issue, something was chewing up resources. After forcing iCue and all Corsair Services to stop suddenly usage dropped to 1% or even 0% in task manager. I re-ran the benchmarks and to my surprise my scores seriously improved. I know the obvious would have been to have nothing running in the first place when benchmarking but I assumed that performance couldn't be gimped so much but I was wrong.

 

In Cinebench R20 with iCue running my multi core score was around 8700 and single core 470. With iCue and Corsair services disable my scores went to multi core 9400 and single core 520.

 

The reason for this as far as I can tell is the program and service somehow make the cpu think it is under a reasonable load and therefore should boost more cores to a lower frequency ignoring whatever other task is being run. When the services were disabled the cpu was able to boost individual cores much higher, easily achieving at least one core at over 4.7ghz and scaling across the others.

 

Is there anything that can be done with iCue to try to sort out this boost issue, I can only assume that it would be present in all Ryzen 3000 chips as its a conflict with iCue and Precision Boost 2. I have tried using core affinity to mitigate the issue but scores become gimped as soon as iCue and the services are running. Also game fps drops due to this issue.

 

My other concern is that the cpu hardly downclocks to save power when idle because it sees iCue constantly running, most cores remain above 4ghz when iCue is running and the services are running but all cores hover around 3.5ghz when those aren't running. Cpu power draw is around 50W at idle with iCue running and services, but 35W with all turned off.

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  • 3 weeks later...

It's a bit dissapointing. My only option to actually fix the issue for the time being is to close iCue and run the hardware lighting while I need maximum boosts.

 

I did a bit more testing to see if using an affinity for iCue could fix things but somehow it still caused all cores to lower their boost, the second iCue was closed it instantly boosted 2 cores to 4.7ghz. As well Asus Aura lightingservice.exe also causes this issue, however corsairservice.exe doesn't affect the boost. I was able to hit 4.7ghz with corsairservice still using 2% cpu.

 

Lets just hope that either Corsair or AMD can do something about this because I would like to use my Corsair products as intended without destroying my pc performance.

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This is amazing to read. I went all corsair products, all hyped to enjoy this, finally got my 3950x

 

I've been having issues with icue closing, now it won't detect my commander pro for no reason, and now I find out it's gimping my hardware.

 

I'm not going to lie I'm very upset, I've spent thousands of dollars on all of this

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  • 9 months later...
This is amazing to read. I went all corsair products, all hyped to enjoy this, finally got my 3950x

 

I've been having issues with icue closing, now it won't detect my commander pro for no reason, and now I find out it's gimping my hardware.

 

I'm not going to lie I'm very upset, I've spent thousands of dollars on all of this

 

Yep. Old post in 2019, but thousands of dollars later, and icue still has this problem on my 2700X and 3900X. I will not be buying anything from Corsair until I see this fixed.

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