AMD Motherboard Voltage and Power Settings Guide
By default, many motherboard manufacturers stray from the voltage and power guidelines set by AMD for extra performance or stability. This however, results in higher thermals and less efficiency.
Following are some quick settings you need to change, or toggle for cooler temperatures and little to no change in performance:
General
Ryzen 7000 Series
- Disable Core Performance Boost (CPB), which allows the processor to run faster than its rated frequency when below power, temperature, and current specifications.
- Disable Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), which allows the processor to run beyond the defined voltage values to the limits of the board, and allows it to boost at higher voltages for longer durations than default.
How Thermals & Performance are affected, BIOS Defaults vs AMD Spec
Performance Impacts
The biggest performance impact these BIOS settings tend to make is on highly threaded workloads. The biggest difference was Cinebench which had about a 10% performance swing, while others were closer to 3-8%. For the rest of the workloads (photo and video editing), performance was largely unchanged.
Thermal Impacts
Disabling PBO and CPB drastically reduces the CPU temperature. On heavy sustained loads like Cinebench multi core, we went from 95C to just 65C – that is a 30C drop in CPU temperature for a mere 10% difference in performance.
Even relatively lighter loads like Photoshop went from temperatures ranging from 60-80C with PBO/CPB enabled to just ~42C with them off. Others like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve were frequently hitting 95C with PBO/CPB and dropped to 40-62C with then disabled, These are workloads that saw no difference in performance, yet the 7950X CPU is as much as 30C, or even 40C, cooler with PBO/CPB disabled.
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