In idle the world is still in order, even without any airflow. The load on the SoC is even higher than on the CPU, but we don’t have any other applications running besides the monitoring and the desktop standard. Let’s have a look…
65 Watt continuous load with and without active air cooling
This application scenario is not unusual, because even in the office, when using a simple APU and several different monitors, a lot of load can accumulate if, for example, a Ryzen 5 3400 G is used. Because that’s exactly when the Vega graphics come to the refreshment bar. Without any real draught, however, this becomes quite scarce after about 10 minutes, because the three CPU phases glow like berserkers. At the hottest point (Low Side A of phase 3) the temperature is 111°C.
But the other MOSFETs also imitate glowworms if the warm evening wind is not present. This is at least borderline and I once again understand why AMD uses the nice downblowers that can provide significant relief for the heat-infested voltage converters.
Because if the air helps, the maximum temperature is 84 °C, so you can live much better. However, I don’t really see much room for overclocking, but we’ll see in a moment. But if you use an ultra-fat tower cooler, you won’t be happy with it either, because e.g. a Thermalright Macho almost covers the voltage regulators again. The MOSFETs don’t get any air and snap breathing is preprogrammed.
95 Watt can only be achieved with air – almost
It gets tight and hot and in the end, despite the air on the MOSFETs, the bitter realization remains that it’s not enough. It’s nice that AMD has already given the Ryzen 5 3600 (X) a lot of computing power, but these boards are not something you really want to have in your computer in performance classes from 65 watts and above. At least none with 3 phases and hiccups, if it clearly goes beyond the 65 watt limit. Because we also shouldn’t forget that I dissipate the CPU waste heat with the water cooler and have a constant 22 °C in the room. At 28 °C room temperature, I don’t want to repeat the 95-watt experiment at all.
Summary and conclusion
In the office and for lighter tasks of not too large CPUs an A320 budget board may still be enough, but for a real gaming machine this is not enough even in the entry-level area. From 65 watts upwards it becomes borderline, from 95 watts even critical. That’s why I’ll never understand how some BBQ tubers proudly offer overclocking orgies, even though the hardware is already suffocating in the sweatbox. Dear children, please don’t imitate!
You can put an APU on it and be happy. A smaller Ryzen of the first and second generation, too, as long as you don’t overclock and get sick at the wattage. But everything else is nothing but attempted homicide of the motherboard or forced early retirement with an unclear expiration date. As tempting as it may be that even for the Ryzen of the 3rd generation there are such inexpensive entry offers from the distant past, those who sacrifice their brains to avarice are guaranteed to pay later. It should be a solid B450 board, preferably with DrMOS.
