ASUS ROG Strix X370i Gaming Review

VRM Temperatures

With all of the Ryzen hardware the key thing to have under control has to be the VRM temperatures. There is nothing worse than the motherboard throttling your CPU back because of inadequate VRM cooling. The Strix doesn’t come with a temperature sensor on the motherboard so we had to utilise a combination of a thermal sensor and an infrared thermal probe to monitor the temperatures as close to the VRM’s as possible (like a built in thermal probe would have been) until we were satisfied that our results we calibrated correctly.

Indeed we spent particularly long over this element because the results were much better than we would have expected them to be given the size of the heatsink on the Strix. You can get away with passive cooling (!) but even with a 1.4v 4GHz overclock in place you don’t need to resort to a direct fan but can simply rely on the natural airflow within your case. These low temperatures guarantee that the board wont thermally throttle and thus we should see some scores that belie its ITX size.