Speaking of the "broken telephone" effect...
The person who originally quoted my post either didn't fully understand what was being said, or alternatively didn't read it completely. Since then the misunderstood / misquoted post has been gaining momentum here at Reddit.
What was actually said:
"According to FIT, the safe voltage levels for the silicon are around 1.325V in high-current loads
and up to 1.47V in low-current loads (i.e ST), depending on the silicon characteristics*."*
Few key things here to understand:
"Depending on the silicon characteristics" is the most important one, and unfortunately it has been completely omitted from the quotes. The figures I mention in the sentence above are based on the average of the CPU specimens I had access at the time. Each and every single piece of silicon has its own unique characteristics and no two pieces of silicon are fully identical. Some of the silicon characteristics will greatly affect how much voltage the silicon, or in this case the CPU will require at given frequency, and especially how much voltage it can endure, without causing a permanent damage. Because of that the figures I mention might or might not fully apply to your specific CPU specimen.
Similar to previous Ryzen CPU generations, Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are also equipped with FIT-feature. FIT is an integrated silicon fitness monitoring feature, which exists in some form on most modern CPU and GPU designs, regardless of the vendor. Its function is to ensure that the performance of the product can be maximised, without allowing the reliability to decrease below a desired threshold. Reliability for the most part is voltage related. FIT will limit the CPU voltage below a point, where the silicon reliability would fall below the desired threshold. So unless the user manually overrides the voltage, there is no way for the CPU to operate at unsafe voltage levels.
A high-current load refers to a situation, where the CPU is essentially running "full beans". Generally very few consumer workloads can be considered as such. Consumer workloads, which come close to such scenario are mostly video encoding (e.g. X264 / X265) and rendering (e.g. Blender).
In low-current load scenarios, where 1-2 CPU cores are being utilised, both of the factors which are essential to and basically solely define the silicon reliability are drastically different: the current flowing through the CPU and the temperature which the CPU operates at, both which are significantly lower compared to a situation where the CPU is running "full beans" or even close to it.
In idle conditions, where the CPU cores, or at least parts of them are power gated most of the time (i.e. sleeping), the voltage becomes even less relevant. When an application or even a service running in the background wakes up a CPU core and causes it to boost to provide optimal performance, obviously there will be an increase in the voltage. Ryzen 3000 CPUs can run at extremely low voltages, but like on every single CPU in existence the higher frequencies require higher voltage to be fed to the CPU. Whenever there are aspects that can be improved in the current sleep-wake behavior remains to be seen. Personally, I have never seen any obvious anomalies in this regard.
In short: Leave the CPU alone, it knows what its doing. There is no guesswork involved when it comes to something as essential, as determining the default silicon characteristic specific voltage-frequency curve of a CPU.
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