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I've been reading up on VRMs, heatsinks, et al. on modern boards (e.g. b450, x470), and I'm a bit lost.

The 2700x, as you know, has XFR and can make use of PBO, and according to reports, this means that manually overclocking is basically a thing of the past.

However, most boards, if you listen to at least some of the pros, have an insufficient power setup to properly supply the 2700x through to it's best (4.3ghz). Add to this that some makers, like MSI, don't have voltage offset, and it seems to me that you have yourself a problem that I don't know how to solve. This is in addition to concerns about thermal walls (e.g. the board will be your limit).

What I'm wondering is, if a builder has a 2700x, requires wifi+bt and a decent sound option, and will be running a fairly hot card (let's say an rx580 as they are popular), is there a way to optimize for this type of setup?

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  • You won't gain much from it, amd has pushed that cpu almost as far as it can go by default. PBO or manual overclock will gain you a minuscule amount of performance at the price of voiding your warranty – dtech Oct 31 '18 at 11:15
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The 2700x, as you know, has XFR and can make use of PBO, and according to reports, this means that manually overclocking is basically a thing of the past.

Not quite, XFR is still better than OC Genie, AI Suite, etc, but not as good as manual OC.

However, most boards, if you listen to at least some of the pros, have an insufficient power setup to properly supply the 2700x through to it's best (4.3ghz).

It's not only a problem of power capability but also a problem of power dissipation on low end cards. The power drawn is not huge, Tom's Hardware got 150W in extreme testing with AVX and 1.475V, which is not the reality. I would go even go further and assume that power dissipation is more an issue than MOSFETs power capabilities, on most cards.

From what I've quickly seen, the 4xx (unlike 3xx) from Gigabyte seem to have decent dissipators on MOSFETs, Asrock too. But anyway, if there's no OC, any decent card would be sufficient even with BT, Wifi and an Rx 580 unless you run it in a closed shoebox.

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  • Yes, I'm taking a look at benchmarks of a b450 board with the 2700x, such as this one here (overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/…). Seems to suggest that even a more or less basic setup will be fine (and get good performance). I think, to resolve this, I will add a couple of 140mm fans up front and consider swapping the cpu cooler for something a bit beefier like the noctua line. I imagine this should keep the whole setup cool enough that the cpu should be able to 'autoclock' it's way along. – Gryph Oct 31 '18 at 16:14
  • Yes definitly the mobo doesn't change anything at CPU performance – Jules R Nov 5 '18 at 7:49

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