As soon as Ryzen 9000 chips are available to buy, you can bet teams of overclockers and solo actors alike will be pushing them to their limit. Knowing this, it appears AMD is preparing a new tool to help enthusiasts squeeze every hertz they can out of their processors. So, within the month, prepare to potentially say hello to ‘Curve Shaper’.
While AMD classically hasn’t offered the best CPUs for overclocking, everything’s to play for with its new Ryzen 9000 processors. Even if Zen 5 CPU cores don’t have a tonne of headroom, that’s still no reason not to see how far we can push clock speeds. Doing so with Curve Shaper in tow should make for a more granular and hopefully more fruitful process.
X user 1usmus claims to have access to a new add-on for AMD Curve Optimizer (CO), an existing tool in Ryzen Master. Dubbed Curve Shaper, the leaker describes it as “an incredible new overclocking feature for enthusiasts.” While we can extract some details from the table they share, containing references to frequencies and temperatures, they thankfully spell out its function in a follow up.
1usmus explains: “Previously, we had to select CO to be stable at both low and high temperatures throughout the entire load range. In most cases the limiting factor was high temperature and low CO. Now everything will change, we will be able to control CO over the whole temperature range.”
In a nutshell, Curve Shaper should stop Ryzen 9000 processors from boosting clock speeds while idle and operating under low temperatures. This, of course, not only reduces power consumption but should also lead to more stable overclocks too as the CPU’s boosting behaviour is under tighter control.
There’s no word on when Curve Optimizer will arrive, nor if it will support prior Zen generations. However, we imagine overclockers won’t be waiting long to get their hands on this new tool.
Until then, we also have the lowdown on Ryzen AI 300 series CPUs and our Ryzen 9 7950X review that’ll whet your appetite for everything AMD, upcoming and current.