The FWD, in both configurations, is advertised with a 120W sustained/140W boost operating capacity. However, on all BIOS revisions so far, this has been locked at 100W and 115W according to HWInfo64. OCCT also reports this - a CPU stress test will bring the package to 115W for a few seconds and settles at 100W all day long. At this point, the fans are starting to spin but temps are not wild. I’ve used UXTU to set CPU PL1 to 140W and PL2 to 160W and now during the CPU test, power tops out at 160W before settling down at around 148W, when the package started to thermal throttle. A 48% increase in available sustained power. Most cores were bouncing in the ~95-98C range with the package (Tdie) topping out at 100C as expected (yes, it took me a while to get used to “100C is normal” too; temps are the same at stock power levels, the fans just don’t spin as aggressively). So the cooling, case, and board are all capable of handling 120W+ sustained, they just don’t get there without outside help. Why is this? (Win11 25H2)
Check if you run in “performance” mode (not sure how windows handles it. I’m running Linux and saw the same 100W cap when running the default balanced mode. With performance I see higher sustainer power usage. You might need to install AMD software to configure this.
The AMD Adrenalin software only offered an ability to overclock the GPU, it doesn’t seem to provide any power tuning that I can find. I’m running Windows’ “Ultimate Performance” mode which is supposed to max everything out but doesn’t seem to touch the power limits.
This is separate from modern performance modes, in the new w11 menu settings you should have an efficiency vs performance toggle
Oh those, I had already tried them, with no discernible effect at all
I’m on Arch Linux and OCCT while in performance profile is holding 140W for about 8 minutes now.
Trying to post this while the stress test runs is sluggish, lol.
Is there something in Windows that could be setting its own limit?
And I’ve dropped to 120W somewhere before the 9:30 mark.
That matches what I can get when I force the power values. Windows seems to keep it locked in 100W/105W for some reason, but I can use ryzen_adj to set power levels and cook along at 140+ until the STAPM limit of 120W kicks in after, yeah, about 6-10 mins depending on prior idle state. I can’t find anything obvious in Windows that would allow me to adjust these limits natively.