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Processors

Ryzen 9 5900X throttling during rendering

Hi everyone, I've sent this question to the company that built my new Ryzen rig, but thought I'd post here too.

From my initial request to them:
-----------------------

I was stress testing the new build I purchased from you and I'm getting some weird behaviour. I have been testing with Cinebench and experiencing severe clock speed reductions. At first I thought it was throttling due to temperature, but after checking with HWinfo64 it doesn't appear to be the case.

In dot point form:

- I start cinebench, CPU clock increases from 3593 MHz (idle) to 4167 MHz (load) on all cores
- CPU temp raises to ~72 deg C and runs comfortably like this for around 2 - 2 1/2 mins
- CPU clock suddenly drops to 546 MHz on all cores, and runs like this for about 5 - 10 sec
- CPU then raises back up to 4167 MHz on all cores, runs like this for around 25 sec before dropping back to 546 MHz
- Temp during the 25 sec pulse only raises to around 68 deg C

If I stop Cinebench for a minute, then re-run it, the same process occurs where it runs fine, but then has the low clock intervals again after a couple of minutes.

Some further info:

- Cinebench single core test does not exhibit the throttling, the core runs at a solid 4.9 GHz for the 10 min duration
 
- I have set the chip to eco mode via Ryzen Master, the throttling issue on multicore is no longer existent but the cores stay at around 3.2 GHz
 
To reiterate, the behaviour seems like thermal throttling but the heat never makes it past 70 degrees, which is well below the chip's limit.
 
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My build is:
 
CPU: Ryzen 5900X
MB: ASUS PRIME B550M-K
RAM: 64GB DDR4 4x16GB DIMMs
GPU: RTX 2060 Super
 
Can you please confirm what might be causing this, or if there is a way to increase the minimum to something more reasonable.
Thanks
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2 Solutions


@DanCaldwell3D wrote:

Thanks amdmatt, I came to the same conclusion - VRMs are the only thing I can't measure the temperature of on this particular MB. Time to chat to the system builder.

TBH I'm kind of annoyed with ASUS' marketing on this model. It says on the page you linked that the "ASUS Prime series is expertly engineered to unleash the full potential of 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen platform". This is not unleashing the full potential. This is hampering it. Even worse is there is no way to research this either - marketing is all you have to go by. I just hope this can be fixed with a bios update or something.

For anyone else buying a Ryzen 5900X expecting to use it for heavy parallel processing tasks like rendering, make sure to choose a motherboard that's not going to crap out on you.


Typically if you are going to be running a 105TDP cpu you will want a motherboard with more built VRM and power delivery. I would avoid B series boards all together if you plan on using a processor that sits nearly at the top of the consumer lineup for power draw. One of the biggest pitfalls people make is not dividing their budget across components correctly and looking to cut cost in the wrong places. That board is more designed to be running a much lower end 65w cpu and you are seeing the voltage regulators on the chipset falling in to a failsafe mode to try and prevent damage. Think of taking a tiny engine in a cheap car and slapping a massive turbo on it, while yes it will technically run as soon as you try to produce power everything is going to break down because it was never designed for that. If you have to have a micro atx board I would suggest looking at this one from ASrock, not my favorit brand but the vrm are much more built up and the chipset has active cooling... these are things that you need to be able to pull the full performance out of high end hardware.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1576783-REG/asrock_x570m_pro4_amd_128g.html/overview

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loc
Adept I

I would say also that throttling is due to poor cpu power delivery. Asus dropped the ball big time with B550 Prime boards unfortunately. VRM testing from Hardware Unboxed.  Asus B550 Prime shut down itself. 

View solution in original post

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15 Replies
misterj
Big Boss

DanCaldwell3D, please use only Ryzen Master (RM) to measure temperatures and other AMD parameters.  HWinfo is one of the worse.  Please run Cinebench R23 and post a screenshot of RM while it is running.  I recommend disabling all MB vendor software and any 'boosting' applications and doing a Clear CMOS first.  Also post more information on your system like OS, Power Supply, memory details (on QVL?), etc.  Thanks and enjoy, John.

Thanks misterj for replying.

I had failed to mention that I had also checked with Ryzen Master and got the same results. I have set my UEFI settings to default, and removed the Armoury Crate software along with the many small bits of software it also installed.

My system specs are as follows:

OS: Win10 Pro Ver 20H2
PSU: Silverstone ET750G 750W
RAM: G-Skill Ripjaws F4-3600C18Q-64GVK 64GB (4x16GB) - Not on QVL
CPU: Ryzen 5900X
Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper 212X
MB: ASUS PRIME B550K-M
GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 Super
Case: Fractal Define C

I have attached screenshots of the different states while running Cinebench R23, showing peak and the throttled periods:

peak.pngthrottled.png

In the throttled image, you can see via the graph how peak performance holds for a good 2.5 minutes, but once it throttles it goes through the cycle of throttling and boosting.

I have tried setting the frequency to manual 3700MHz via RM, which improves the situation but there is still the throttling (though much less frequent, happened 3 times during the 10 min Cinebench session) and I lose the high single core clock speed due to the frequency being capped.

Thanks for looking into this misterj.

Cheers

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A couple of other points I want to mention:

- I am not interested in overclocking or trying to eke out every last bit of performance, I basically want to get the out-of-the-box, all core performance I paid for.

- I want to use these cores for rendering. A steady, ongoing speed and stability is far better to me than bursts of speed. In fact, setting the chip to Eco mode actually yielded a higher Cinebench score at 3.2GHz than at the default settings with boost, because of the severe intermittent throttling. I could of course run the chip in Eco mode, but like I said above that's not what I paid for.

EDIT

Could it possibly be the MOSFETs on the motherboard?

 

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The behaviour you described sounds like the motherboard VRMS could be throttling performance, perhaps due to overheating, and this would result in the processor dropping frequency down to 500~Mhz. Based on what you have described, this sounds possible. 

I checked your motherboard and it does not appear to have any heatsinks covering the VRM/Mosfet area. 

Untitled.png

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/All-series/PRIME-B550M-K/

It may be possible to monitor Motherboard VRM temps using HWINF64. But this would depend on if the monitoring is possible on this motherboard, as i have two Asus motherboards a Crosshair VIII Hero and a Prime Pro and only the former allows monitoring of VRM temps.

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Thanks amdmatt, I came to the same conclusion - VRMs are the only thing I can't measure the temperature of on this particular MB. Time to chat to the system builder.

TBH I'm kind of annoyed with ASUS' marketing on this model. It says on the page you linked that the "ASUS Prime series is expertly engineered to unleash the full potential of 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen platform". This is not unleashing the full potential. This is hampering it. Even worse is there is no way to research this either - marketing is all you have to go by. I just hope this can be fixed with a bios update or something.

For anyone else buying a Ryzen 5900X expecting to use it for heavy parallel processing tasks like rendering, make sure to choose a motherboard that's not going to crap out on you.


@DanCaldwell3D wrote:

Thanks amdmatt, I came to the same conclusion - VRMs are the only thing I can't measure the temperature of on this particular MB. Time to chat to the system builder.

TBH I'm kind of annoyed with ASUS' marketing on this model. It says on the page you linked that the "ASUS Prime series is expertly engineered to unleash the full potential of 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen platform". This is not unleashing the full potential. This is hampering it. Even worse is there is no way to research this either - marketing is all you have to go by. I just hope this can be fixed with a bios update or something.

For anyone else buying a Ryzen 5900X expecting to use it for heavy parallel processing tasks like rendering, make sure to choose a motherboard that's not going to crap out on you.


Typically if you are going to be running a 105TDP cpu you will want a motherboard with more built VRM and power delivery. I would avoid B series boards all together if you plan on using a processor that sits nearly at the top of the consumer lineup for power draw. One of the biggest pitfalls people make is not dividing their budget across components correctly and looking to cut cost in the wrong places. That board is more designed to be running a much lower end 65w cpu and you are seeing the voltage regulators on the chipset falling in to a failsafe mode to try and prevent damage. Think of taking a tiny engine in a cheap car and slapping a massive turbo on it, while yes it will technically run as soon as you try to produce power everything is going to break down because it was never designed for that. If you have to have a micro atx board I would suggest looking at this one from ASrock, not my favorit brand but the vrm are much more built up and the chipset has active cooling... these are things that you need to be able to pull the full performance out of high end hardware.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1576783-REG/asrock_x570m_pro4_amd_128g.html/overview

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Thanks for your reply Nekela - your car analogy makes perfect sense to me :) 

In hindsight, going with a lower end motherboard probably wasnt the best decision. My biggest issue is that none of the low end MB manufacturers really state that the boards aren't designed to handle high core CPUs. Add to that the fact that I have a brand new CPU model, and that reviews were embargoed until release etc., there was no real data to work with to determine suitability. 

I mean, it WORKS, but for render scenarios i have to switch to a manual throttle of 3750MHz (the result of my stability test), which is a bit like putting a brick under the accelerator of your car to stop the engine breaking it. 

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Could this be more a problem of the Micro ATX and not so much about b550? I'm getting a 9 5900x with a b550 ATX board and this is worrying me.

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@Aegamus wrote:

Could this be more a problem of the Micro ATX and not so much about b550? I'm getting a 9 5900x with a b550 ATX board and this is worrying me.


It isn’t something that you will run in to with all B series boards but it makes way more sense to spend the extra 80-100 for a quality x570 board if you are going to be using a very high end cpu and wanting to get full performance. The reason for a lot of the variance in cost between motherboards comes down to the quality of and how over built the power delivery systems are. Currently I use an asus x570 prime pro for my system because it hit the sweet spot for me of being able to power the OC I use on my 3800x and remain very stable. Whenever the silicon gods decide to smile on me and grace me with the presence of an in stock 5950 I will upgrade the motherboard as well to something even more capable 

 

Hey Aegamus - I think its a problem specifically relating to the parts feeding power to the CPU overheating. If you're going with a b550 at least make sure there are heatsinks on the VRMs. FWIW, I wish I got an X570 board. 

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DanCaldwell3D, I suggest using the largest fan that will fit in the area and pointing it directly at the area amdmatt showed in his post.  Please plug the fan directly into the 12Volt power supply.  There are adapters for SATA and other power supply power cables.  Please let us hear if this helps.  Enjoy, John.

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Hey John, thanks for the suggestion - in terms of isolating the issue this might work, but unless I cut a big hole in the side of my case I dont think it's an ideal long term solution. 

For now I have a workable solution (it means hobbling the chips potential performance, but its better than having the severe performance dips) but I'll eventually upgrade the motherboard.

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HWiNFO64 is one of the best utilities. But it has limited developers and also limited people who can afford to own every single possible Laptop or Motherboard that's ever released so that they can run RwEverywhere which is a tool for coders who can write Device Drivers. I messaged the dev to tell him that the FANspeed was reporting incorrectly and he advised me to run this software, send him the results, and soon there was an update that fixed my issue.

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loc
Adept I

I would say also that throttling is due to poor cpu power delivery. Asus dropped the ball big time with B550 Prime boards unfortunately. VRM testing from Hardware Unboxed.  Asus B550 Prime shut down itself. 

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@loc wrote:

I would say also that throttling is due to poor cpu power delivery. Asus dropped the ball big time with B550 Prime boards unfortunately. VRM testing from Hardware Unboxed.  Asus B550 Prime shut down itself. 


Wow that's insightful.. I wish I had seen this before I got my new system built! 

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