HWinfo claims that X570 motherboards from a variety of manufacturers are guilty of underreporting power to Ryzen CPUs so the chips will go faster at stock settings, but at the possible expense of chip longevity. It doesn't appear that AMD condones the misreporting. However, in response, AMD said that it was investigating the issue, but it doesn’t believe the chips will suffer excessive wear during the warranty period. So, after we wrote an article about the software vendor’s claims and its new feature (designed to detect the problem), we set out to determine if the new test was accurate and if there was any imminent danger to the health of Ryzen CPUs from motherboard makers cooking the books.
After testing three different X570 motherboards, using a variety of settings, cooling solutions and even firmware, we found that, while HWinfo does shine a light on some issues, it can output inflated values that aren't representative of actual power misreporting. Of the three motherboards -- an ASRock X570 Taichi, MSI X570 Godlike and an Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master, only the Taichi showed a huge delta between reported and actual power that resulted in increased performance. Those settings resulted in higher clock rates, voltages, and heat output. And that issue, which happened with the reviewer BIOS, largely disappeared once we installed the latest firmware. The remaining relatively small variances of 10 to 15 percent are easily explained by factors such as VRM variations, though.
