I have tried googling this and can't find anything.
I recently updated the BIOS on my ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F Gaming motherboard and now all the CPU cores are stuck at 4.22GHz. I know there's a setting somewhere to allow them to throttle down and up but I can't for the life of me either recall or google what it is. Does anyone know which setting I need so that the CPU scales? It used to go between about 1.2GHz and 4.4GHz.

In the BIOS there should be settings related to CPU power management or C-states - it will be called whatever Asus decided to label it but look for words like 'Turbo' or 'Boost' or 'Power Saving' and see if that does it. In linux, there's the 'CPU performance governor' which is usually set to 'on-demand' or something like that, but if the BIOS isn't exposing that feature it likely won't matter what the OS is trying to do. Here's a bit on the linux side: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.1...m/cpufreq.html

Also, before going down this whole rabbit hole - are you sure there isn't some process or task that's stuck in a race condition and keeping the clocks up? I've seen that happen more than a few times over the years, to the point that that's always my first go-to when I see a modern system not dynamically clocking - then I'll resort to digging around in the BIOS and /sys/devices/cpu...

I have looked for C states but it's not obvious - I recall it took me a while to find the setting before but my mind is getting feeble and I can't recall the exact setting. I know that the CPU isn't being stressed as I have conky and system monitor running so can see all the core speeds and they're all stuck on 4.22GHz rather than scaling as they should.

Look for something like 'Turbo Boost' in the BIOS. From a quick look at the user's manual (https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/m...IOS_EM_WEB.pdf) it may be called 'CPB' or it may be 'hidden' within the TDP/EPU options shown on Page 6. It also probably requires 'Ai Overclock Tuner' to be set to 'Auto' and any manual overclock settings to not be entered (I've seen some systems that can retain dynamic clocking along with manual overclocking, but that usually is not the norm in my experience).

Thank you, I will look. The settings seem to be deliberately confusing I wish they just labelled them as what they do.

You upgraded the bios.
In my experience, in order for the new version to work properly you may need to do a reset to default of all the bios settings, then if needed tweak the settings for your usage.

Sometimes a bios update will misread certain settings that were retained and they can be having an unintended effect. Resetting it to default will recover the settings and then you can customize it to fit your hardware & OS.

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In my case with all the Gigabyte motherboards I have, every BIOS update has resulted in a 'reset' to defaults for all settings. I would assume ASUS would be the same. But maybe not.... And the default is Turbo boost enabled which I go and disable as I don't need the 'boost' cycling up and down. Ryzen 5000 series CPUs at base GHz provide plenty of power for what I do.

I'd assume the ASUS manual should have short explanation of each BIOS setting. Hope you find it. As suggested above maybe manually reset the BIOS to get back to defaults.

Admittedly I'm not sure how this functions on Ryzen, but on FX (and Intel) disabling 'Boost' both disables the 'beyond base clock' mode, but also the idling states, which will cause the machine to use more power than it needs to, and potentially run warmer than it needs to. What you can do instead is set the maximum boost multiplier to be equal to the base clock, or (on Intel this is especially easy) simply set the TDP limit to a sane value (read: either use the actual manufacturer default (and not the 4096W or 255W that most boards set) or pick something relatively low like 65W or 95W) and that will set a lower boost to conserve energy/thermals while still enabling idle C-states as well.

I linked it in my post.

I don't really know what is happening behind the scene either ... But I know with Turbo Boost disabled, my CPU 'idle' temp sits around 30C and I don't see the 'spiking' of temp which caused the fans to ramp up and down. This is with an air-cooled Ryzen 5900X processor too that I have in my R&D box. Obviously when when I run a couple VMs and do some heavy compiles, htop shows more processors getting involved and higher percentage of use on each with the corresponding rise in temp although I haven't seen it get over 65C. So appears to me that disabling the AMD Turbo boost, just doesn't allow cpu to boost past the 3.7GHz. Everything else is fair game.

If it's still able to do idle states (so clocking lower than 3.7GHz in your example) that's all I'd be concerned about - most of the time my systems don't require their CPUs to be running at 'base' clock, let alone whatever absurd 'peak' clocks they've been advertised at - and I completely agree with backing off of that for power/thermal savings unless you're trying to wring every last nth of performance out of the system.

Thank you all. I had a few other settings to make sure I got right before trying so it took me a while but putting it back to "optimies defaults" (whatever that means) then reclocking the memory to 3200GHz did the trick allowing it to scale at least. Now to see whether I can up the boost frequency but that's less of a priority.
I'm using the system to game, amongst other things, so the higher I can get the CPU to go the better, really, not sure whether using Proton (through Steam) slows things or modern games really are just system hogs but I know despite my moderately good system games could be faster.

Usually the performance hit of Proton/wine is not extreme. I think phoronix has done some comparisons. Most games are single-thread performance bound, or GPU limited.

Yeah, the single-thread performance is why I wanted to turn it off 4.2Ghz all cores and get some boost but it doesn't seem to want to hit 4.5GHz even on a couple of cores. I think I just have a trash CPU - basically conned by AMD into spending ~$120 extra for nothing.

Modern chips are generally binned with little headroom left - big overclocks are a historical curiosity at this point for the most part. Also consider 4.2ghz to 4.5ghz itself would not be a very substantial increase anyways (it’s only around 5% at best).

True, but my reason for being annoyed is that I spent the equivalent of about $120 on the 3800x as opposed to the 3700x for increased performance I'm not seeing and, for that matter, about the same amount more on a motherboard with obtuse controls and, it seems, no gains either not to mention an aftermarket cooler (well, OK I took that from my old machine). My own fault, in part, I know but I used to run my old AMD chip at a substantial overclock due to having decent cooling and motherboard now I just have a waste of money sitting on my desk to remind me every day.