Great.Stilt, I have another question that I think only you could answer. How did cherv get that 8GHz validation on the ASRock A88X Extreme 6+ without it throttling? I have that board and my Athlon 760K throttles like a little bitch when pushing towards 5GHz. Is it just because of LN2? I thought I was a descent overclocker until I saw your tools and I don't even know what do do with them but I'd love to get throttling disabled for some suicide runs.

The VRM on ASRock runs quite hot even at stock clocks.

Partitially because of the design and partitially because the VRM heatsink has a very small surface area to dissipate the heat from.

So if you have disabled the "ApmMaster" option in bios the throttling is definitely caused by the overheating VRM.

In that case adding some directed air flow on the VRM heatsink might help, at least a bit.



On LN2 it is completely different.

Even thou the total power consumption *might* be higher than on clocks achievable on air cooling the VRM overheating usually won't be an issue.

The VRM power components (fets in this case) are directly connected to the CPU with hundreds of highly conductive copper vias / traces.

When the CPU is cooled down to temperatures closer to -190°C the VRM temperature also drops significantly, down to -40°C at idle.

So practically the VRM temperatures won't be a issue on dry-ice or LN2 cooling. More likely the over-current (OCP) or the actual design-current (I/TDC) limits get reached.

On a properly designed board reaching any of the current limits will cause an immediate shutdown instead of throttling, thou.