[SOLVED] Are more power phases (VRM) on motherboard means more overheating?

[Amigo1982]

Hello,
Are more power phases (VRM) on motherboard means more overheating?
ASRock has B550 Pro4 and Phantom Gaming 4 which are with 8 power phases both have very small chipset heatsink!
Again ASRock has B550 Steel Legend and Extreme 4 and they are with 14 power phases and the chipset heatsink is very big.
So i wonder which model to buy
CPU is Ryzen 3950X with Noctua NH-D14 and the CPU temperature blow hot 85 Celsius and go back to 65 degrees too often.
I am with ASRock X570 Gaming 4 but i saw a few tests that B550 mobos runs a little colder than X570 chipset.
So i hope that this CPU runs hot on ASRock X570 Gaming4 but with B550 mobo will be a little bit colder.
I just do internet and Youtube streaming. So i do not know why the temperature varies so much with Ryzen. With my previous Core i9 9900K never had so big variations like from 58 to go to 85 degrees for a while.
The motherboard temperatures are normally 45 to 65 degrees max on the chipset but i still think to go to B550 also because my X570 mobo has a chipset fan which makes additional noise.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Hello,
Are more power phases (VRM) on motherboard means more overheating?
ASRock has B550 Pro4 and Phantom Gaming 4 which are with 8 power phases both have very small chipset heatsink!
Again ASRock has B550 Steel Legend and Extreme 4 and they are with 14 power phases and the chipset heatsink is very big.
So i wonder which model to buy
CPU is Ryzen 3950X with Noctua NH-D14 and the CPU temperature blow hot 85 Celsius and go back to 65 degrees too often.
I am with ASRock X570 Gaming 4 but i saw a few tests that B550 mobos runs a little colder than X570 chipset.
So i hope that this CPU runs hot on ASRock X570 Gaming4 but with B550 mobo will be a little bit colder.
I just do internet and Youtube streaming. So i do not know why the temperature varies so much with Ryzen. With my previous Core i9 9900K never had so big variations like from 58 to go to 85 degrees for a while.
The motherboard temperatures are normally 45 to 65 degrees max on the chipset but i still think to go to B550 also because my X570 mobo has a chipset fan which makes additional noise.

First...the term 'phases' is a pretty well meaningless these days, especially when looking at the marketing literature we're given to make choices from. But in general, more phases means there will be more of the devices that do the regulating (FET's or power blocks) and that means it will need a bigger heat sink to cover them all.

More phases means it should run cooler, all else equal, because there are more devices to spread the total current load across.

With Ryzen, AMD and Intel have taken a different approach to power saving. Ryzen follows a 'rush to idle' approach that tries to keep all cores in a deep sleep state as much as possible and only brings the minimum number out to process a transient task. When it does it boosts as high as possible, within thermal and power constraints, in order to get it done and put the core back to sleep.

So even at 'idle' it's constantly boosting one core at a time to max clock...but one core only...on light bursty loads. The processor has dozens of temp sensors scattered all over and when it boosts all you're seeing is the hottest one at that slice in time in that tiny area.

It's really not much thermally speaking, it's like a match in a room...not nearly enough to warm the whole room. But when running a multi-threaded task it's heating up a bigger area, and add in something AVX heavy like rendering and the area's even bigger. It starts to be more of a roaring fireplace than a match and the whole processor is getting hot.

The thing to do is look at an average temperature reading like you can get in HWInfo64.

 

[Amigo1982]

After that explanation no way to not accept this answer as a solution.
Yes, it looks like Ryzen heats up different from Intel and into the program called Phantom Gaming Tuning shows a big variation in temps like 65 to 89 degrees.
In Corsair link app shows the same. But when i touch the CPU cooler it is not so hot! Will install other monitoring program like HWInfo64.
Also it looks that Ryzen 3950X draws more power than is supposed to draw 105W CPU, especially at heavy load. Of course depends how you will use it but Corsair Link shows like 30-40 W more in average "Power in" and "Power out" compared to my previous Core i9 9900K, which is 95W TDP. So be ready to pay a little more for electricity if you will buy Ryzen 3950X and if you will use it a few hours per day or more.
Thx.

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
Corsair Link shows like 30-40 W more in average "Power in" and "Power out"
...

I'm not sure how Corsair link works, but all the current and therefore power readings from processor telemetry are a bit wonky until you calibrate them. Not many...if any...motherboard mfr's calibrate them so they report accurate so it's really just sort of relative. I understand there is a place for mfr's to input correction factors in the AGESA code at BIOS compile time.

HWInfo reports out a 'power reporting deviation' metric to try and help with understanding that better. It's explained here; some mfr's actually mis-calibrate them to gain a performance advantage. It's made possible by the way Ryzen's boost algorithm works based on power margins. I have read that they do something similar for Intel boards but in a way that works with Intel's boost algorithm, therefore I have to imagine it's going to make utilities to report out similarly incorrect.

But I also wonder if Link is reporting the power out to the CPU power plugs if you have a Corsair PSU. If so you would have to compensate for VRM efficiency (which can be considerable) and remember that it powers the VSoC VRM.

The only correct and meaningful way to compare power consumption, especially across platforms, is at the wall using something like a Kill-A-Watt. That method considers all factors and removes the innacuracies inherent in bad utilities and motherboard mfr's gaming of performance parameters.