Power Consumption and Temperatures

For temperature measurement, I use a Reed SD-947 4 channel Data Logging Thermometer paired with four Omega Engineering SA1 Self Adhesive Thermocouple probes. One probe directly touches the chipset, and two are placed on select power stages. The last probe actively logs the ambient temperature.


For the Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX, one probe is centered along the bank of power stages. A probe is left out to log the ambient temperature. All temperatures are presented as Delta-T normalized to 20 °C, which is the measured temperature minus the ambient temperature plus 20 °C. The end result accounts for variation in ambient temperature, including changes over the course of a test, while presenting the data as if the ambient were a steady 20 °C for easy presentation. Additionally, there is no longer any direct airflow over the VRM with this new setup, placing extra strain on the VRM cooling.

For the numbers seen in the chart above, I am now using Prime95's Small FFT test for power consumption. For temperatures, I am using the maximum temperatures recorded over the course of my standard benchmark suite (almost always during either wPrime or Blender tests). However, relatively short tests do not put enough strain on the system to get a look at how the VRM performs at the limit, so I added an additional test to try to thermally abuse Vcore as much as possible.

This test typically involves a 30 minute Prime95 run at the maximum overclock the motherboard can maintain, again with no airflow over the VRM. For B550, I chose 4.2 GHz at 1.35 V as the most intensive load I could manage in long tests without thermal throttling the CPU. Temperatures are logged every second, and the two probes are then averaged for a cleaner presentation before subtracting the ambient to calculate the Delta-T. The results are charted below.


The Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX did extremely well in my VRM torture test, staying below 65 °C. There should be no doubt that this board can handle anything AMD has to offer.

Note: I was only able to capture a single VRM temperature as my thermal probe broke and I am currently waiting on replacements.