AMD GPU drivers overclock some Ryzen processors without asking

Back in SeptemberAMD has added support for minor CPU overclocking to its graphics drivers. If you have a Ryzen 5000-series CPU and want to take advantage of a little extra performance, this auto-overclocking function can save you from having to download The most complex Ryzen Master utilityand overclocking will be conservative enough that it likely won’t cause system instability or other problems.

The problem for some users is that the automatic overclocking feature has become is very Automated – that is, it changes the overclocking settings of the systems whether users want it or not.

AMD representative Tell Tom’s Hardware that an “AMD suite of software issue” caused the feature to start “Adjust certain AMD processor settings for some users.” Since the CPU overclocking feature actually changes the settings in your system BIOS, this means that the overclocking settings that users changed themselves can be changed and the overclocking applied where there was no overclocking before. This second bit can be particularly problematic because overclockers generally void AMD’s CPU warranty, even when using AMD-provided tools such as Ryzen Master or use advertised features from AMD such as Accuracy increase speed (anyway, passiveThis policy is not always enforced.

Computers using AMD GPUs with Intel CPUs will not be affected by this error because the AMD software will not overclock Intel processors.

according to Testing by Igor’s Laboratory and by Users in the AMD subreddit, the error appears to be triggered when loading a GPU overclocking profile that was created with older versions of the program. These profiles were created before CPU overclocking was added to the program, but the program doesn’t realize this and tries to modify the CPU settings anyway.

AMD says it is “investigating” what software is causing the problem and that the company “will share more information as soon as we can”. The issue appears to have been introduced in version 22.3.1 of the AMD Adrenalin driver package, so stopping to update or rolling back to an earlier driver version may prevent or fix the issue.