AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X Review

Temperatures and Power Draw

With so many cores available, running with the Precision Boost Overdrive is the best blend of performance and thermal control. Attempting to push all the cores hard with an overclock quickly ran into thermal issues, even with our triple rad AIO in place. Fortunately PBO is good enough, as you’ve seen today, that manually overclocking doesn’t really bring anything other than more heat. Those who want to overclock need a custom watercooling setup at minimum. We know that sub 90°C is fine technically, but we wouldn’t want to run at these temperatures for the lengths our systems are up and working. You can also see how well PBO tames those temperatures, and how at stock they drop dramatically without really losing much performance to achieve that.