You clearly have more experience than me, there's not doubting it. The last time I overclocked a CPU was back when FX was the only AMD offering, so it's safe to say I have no clue what I'm doing half the time. Although the overall pointlessness of the overclock managed to net me 7FPS in Arma3 ultimately achieving above 60FPS. Anyways, Thanks for the enlightenment.
That's simply because in games, the CPU is not nearly at such a load level and thus power consumption as it would be for example in Cinebench R23. This goes back a bit to the post i linked here.
Arma3 is CPU heavy, I tested it with a RX580, GTX 1660S, RX5700 XT, RTX 2070 , RTX 3080 & 3080TI they all achieved the same performance in my unscientific experiment. The entire purpose of the overclock was to gain more performance in Arma3. As for any other game or application I absolutely agree with you. I'm fairly certain I had theses settings on "Short and Long Duration 4096W, Current Limit 256A".That's simply because in games, the CPU is not nearly at such a load level and thus power consumption as it would be for example in Cinebench R23. This goes back a bit to the post i linked here.
With different load, you have different power consumption. So in games, your GPU is far more loaded than your CPU, but obviously the CPU still has some influence on the overall performance. Since the CPU doesn't run into the power limit (which seems to still be active in your BIOS), because the load is less demanding in games, it can actually clock higher and your OC can achieve something. However, with more demanding load, such as encoding, rendering, in short, any real full multi-core CPU load, the CPU hits the ceiling of the power limit, which also restricts the performance. So once you fully load your CPU in a more demanding way than in games, your CPU performance might very well drop below the level you could have achieved by simply removing the power limits in the BIOS and not overclocking at all. That's what i meant with "it would basically be for nothing".
So if you want your OC to truly be effective with any kind of load, no matter how demanding, you'd have to max out the power limits. They are found on this page:
Short and Long Duration 4096W, Current Limit 256A, or by selecting "Water Cooler" here:
But while you're now still seeing under 90°C with a mere 220W due to the power limits, prepare for your cooling to be utterly overwhelmed then. This is the true consequence of such overclocking.
And by no means would i advise this with your CPU, because the efficiency goes to hell, even if you could cool it.
If all of my assumptions are correct (and they aren't always, i will freely admit that), then you have essentially overclocked for less demanding scenarios only, and with more demanding scenarios you might even lose performance, compared to just maxing out the power limits without any OC whatsoever.
This should be visible in HWinfo64 then, by the amount of CPU power draw. If you open the sensors and double-click on CPU Package Power, it will show a graph that tracks CPU power draw over time. Then start your game and play a bit. After exiting it, you will have the graph of the power draw right there. Usually in games it should stay well below 200W power draw for the CPU. So whatever is limiting to 220W maximum power draw, it's not a factor with that kind of load. Ok, if the CPU draws 200W or more in that game, then it really is CPU-heavy for a game. But i'd like to see that.
That's odd then that it would peak at 220W, which coincides with the non-overclocked power draw from the pictures. And you said the CPU temperatures are still not hitting the high 90s, which would be thermal throttling territory. Maybe there's some other factor involved, like VRM throttling, which would not be immediately obvious. I can only say, with 5.2 GHz all-core @1.385V, you should be seeing well over 300W CPU power draw and your cooling should be in a lot of trouble. Maybe something already is in trouble and there's some sort of liming/throttling at play. All the more reason to have a look at all the sensors in HWinfo64 with different kinds of load. Again, my offer, create a new topic and we could dive a little deeper into that.
Good job!
RMA was approved instantly and I have already shipped it via FedEx. Hopping for a quick turn around.
Sorry @citay, I didn't notice this one until today. I have a Z490 MEG Godlike
hello @citay I am a new user with the moba z490 gaming plus, I found out about the msi problem by video and reddit, having the mobo in standard version up to which version can I update without problems, can I skip the updates until the last known stable?
