Page 11 - Thermal Measurements and Overclocking
As we have already seen, the ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi has two chunky heatsinks over the 16+2+2 80A power stage design along with a passive heatsink over the X870E chipset. The X870E chipset has a 14W TDP, which does not require active cooling. For this test, I put the system under full load using Prime95 and used an Etekcity Lasergrip 800 infrared thermometer to measure the surface temperature of key areas of the motherboard after 30 minutes. The surface temperature of both VRM heatsinks came in under 50c, while the chipset heatsink measured only 34.8c, as shown in our above photo. I have not experienced any stability problems caused by heat while using this motherboard. I also scanned the surface of the entire motherboard using the infrared thermometer and there were no areas of concern or outliers on the ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi.
In today's day and age, overclocking your CPU has become a bit unnecessary. This is because many modern processors from both Intel and AMD come with boost settings that allow for excellent performance out of the box. Specifically with AMD, there are a few settings that users can modify in the BIOS or using Ryzen Master. For this review, I have shown some of the options available in the BIOS UEFI.
As mentioned earlier, there seem to be two distinct sections in the BIOS that show the manual overclocking sections, with the more extreme changes located under the Advanced tab. In fact, every time you enter the AMD Overclocking section, you will see this warning message that operating your processor outside of factory settings may damage your processor. In these cases, it is possible any damage from overclocking may not be under warranty coverage. To proceed, you must click Accept. Selecting Decline leads you to a blank page.
Once you enter the AMD Overclocking page, you will see all sorts of more defined overclocking sections, including areas to overclock your CPU, memory, and the Infinity Fabric frequency timings. You can set different voltages to either overvolt or undervolt, as well as set up the motherboard for different cooling modes, such as with liquid nitrogen. The Manual CPU Overclocking page is more of an old school approach, with the ability to set the frequency and voltage directly.
Under the Precision Boost Overdrive menu, you can set up enable and set up different limits. Enabling it already allows the processor to run above the defined limits of the CPU and towards the limits of the motherboard. Within this menu, you can select the Curve Optimizer and Curve Shaper. Curve Optimizer came with Ryzen 5000 series of processors, and it lets you tune the adaptive voltage and frequency scaling, or AVFS, curve of the CPU or specific cores. This is meant to let you tweak these fixed curves to potentially increase the CPU's performance. You can set the optimizer to apply to all cores, to specific cores, or to specific CCD. Curve Shaper is the latest addition with the Ryzen 9000 series as an add-on for Curve Optimizer. Here, you can get even more granular control to set specific voltage offsets based on different temperatures and frequencies.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Bundle and Chipset
3. Physical Look - Hardware, Board Layout
4. BIOS and Test System
5. Benchmark: AIDA64
6. Benchmark: Cinebench 2024
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 11
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Onboard Sound Frequency Analysis
11. Thermal Measurements and Overclocking
12. Conclusion
