Question Which one to trust more? Motherboard software or MSI Afterburner

[gtimmis07]

I have MSI afterburner installed on my windows 10 PC. I have just recently upgraded to the Ryzen 9 7900x and I have been having issues with the temps of the CPU as everyone else has had and for the same reason. I have been using MSI afterburner to monitor those temps thus far. However, I just recently dove into my motherboards software from Asus its called Armoury Crate, while rooting around in the cooling section of the software I happen upon the reading that the motherboard was getting from the CPU and it was on average about 13 degrees lower then what MSI afterburner was reporting the CPU temp. So the question is... Which one to trust more? Motherboard software or MSI Afterburner. I leave it up to the experts that I know have knowledge far beyond mine to decide. I am running an ASUS X670 WIFI-P motherboard, Ryzen 9 7900x, 32GB of 5600mhz DDR5 Ram and I have a 360mm AIO from cooler master on the CPU.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Karadjgne]

The problem isn't specific to your amd cpu, anyone can have those discrepancies.
Temps get sampled at specific times by the software, many sample at 1000ms, some sample at 500ms, some at 256ms. The cpu reports every 256ms. So if it reports 50,60,70,50 and Afterburner is sampling on the 3rd 256ms, it'll read a temp of 70°C. Another program reading at 256ms might report only the 4th read every 1000ms, so you'd see a temp of 50°C.

Both are correct, but since the screen you look at only changes every second or three, you don't see the actual changes, it'd happen so fast all you'd see is the digital '88', a blur.

It's not that any specific program is inaccurate, they don't actually 'read' the temps, they sample the temps from what bios via the cpu supplies.

The best way to see actual temps is via a graph, where you can judge the reported software temp vrs what the cores supply, which can be difficult at times with multiple core processors unless you use a steady state load like Prime95 small fft which taxes all the cores essentially equally.

 

[gtimmis07]

Well thats the thing man, I get the sampling rates but these two temps dont ever come close to each other. I let it idle for 10 mins and they never came close to each other. Tonight I'm going in install Ryzen Master Utility to see what I am getting for that.

 

[Eximo]

Package temp vs core temp most likely, have to know what you are looking at. Or average temps vs hot spot temps.

Ryzen Master is your best source for CPU temps I believe, as those temps are what actually control the CPU boost.

 

[Paperdoc]

When using an ASUS mobo, I would be much more confident in the software utility provided by ASUS who MADE that mobo!

 

[Eximo]

But they didn't make the CPU, and unless they outright define what the temperature readouts are measuring, it is the same as guessing.

Polling rate, averages, showing the hottest at all times. There are a lot of ways to handle the incoming data.

On Intel I know that each core has several sensors and the hottest temperature recorded for each core is what makes it to the per-core temperatures in something like HWMonitor. CPU temp is typically an average of those results, and package temperature is a separate sensor and is more like the temperature at the cooling interface.

 

[hotaru.hino]

For Ryzen CPUs there's three main temperatures:

• The hottest temperature that any of the sensors are reporting
• The average temperature of all of the sensors
• The average temperature of the CCD(s)

The one that gets reported as the CPU temperature is often the first one. If the application only reports one CPU temperature, it'll be that. It's also the one that'll be changing the most frequently, so it should be expected that monitoring apps won't report the same temperature if they only poll it once a second at different parts of that second.

 

[Karadjgne]

Ryzen Master doesn't report a single temp. It takes all the reported temps for 3 seconds and averages them, and thats the temp it reports, giving an averaged temp of the entire cpu. To see Hotspot temps requires HWInfo which has several reported temp avenues as said above.

 

[gtimmis07]

Thank you all for the information! Honestly, the fact that the Asus software was reporting well below what everyone else has had on these CPUs made me suspect about it's accuracy. Master utility is reporting basically the same as Asus or at least within a merge of error. I'm willing to take MSI Afterburner on its word and use it to monitor my CPU temps. Better safe than sorry MSI was always the higher temp of the softwares but like I said Master utility is reporting about the same just slightly lower which would make sense if it's an average temp read out.