ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 5.5Ghz @ 55x multiplier.

To help with this overclock I dusted off my Single Stage Phase cooler in hopes of drawing the 300-something watts off the processor and actually get a decent overclock.  What I found is that, on paper this overclock is very mid.  5.5Ghz is pretty much where the Ryzen 9 9950X runs under normal conditions but only across a couple cores.  Once you spread that clock across all 16 cores the amount of heat produced jumps up considerably as does the performance but, only across certain workloads.

I also discovered that the heatsink mounting position on the AM5 is quite different from what my SS Phase is setup for so, I had to mount everything a little different but, seems to have worked out quite well.

There is a sneaky trick that motherboard markers are pulling to basically Min-Max performance when it comes to multi core CPUs.  We all know that running every core at full speed will generate too much heat.  The solution to this is to have 2 or more cores run at a much higher speed while the rest of the CPU is throttled back to remain stable.  If the loads get too high then the entire CPU will throttle back.

Under load the Ryzen 9 9950X will run at 5.5Ghz, there are a couple cores that will run 5.7Ghz and several that run quite a bit slower.

With my overclock on my Single Stage Phase I was limited to either using the AI Overclocking feature (which didn’t do much) or set a clock speed across the entire CPU.  It would run at 5.7Ghz and would complete a Cinebench R20 run at 5.6Ghz but would not run the entire benchmarking suite unless I throttled back to 5.5Ghz and lowered the vCore considerably. 

This was rather disappointing since it really provided a net zero in clock speed and only showed a benefit in the multi core benchmarks, it made the game tests slower and didn’t do much in the real world tests.  So while overclocking in the AMD platform is very much alive, it seems to only be a benefit under extreme overclocking with LN2.