Overclocking
When it comes to overclocking, the Ryzen 9 3900X and the X570 chipset, there is no mystery to it. B550 motherboards use a cheaper chipset and often have cheaper voltage controllers and VRM implementations which don’t allow for the same degree of flexibility found on higher end motherboards. That being said, the B550 Aorus Master isn’t the same as other B550 motherboards. It has the same voltage hardware design as the X570 Aorus Xtreme. As a result, the B550 Aorus Master will never hold you back and your CPU will certainly be the limiting factor here.
Unfortunately, our test CPU is incapable of achieving stability at 4.3GHz. As a result, 4.2GHz was all that I could get out of it with stability. This required a voltage setting of 1.4v, which reads as 1.38v in CPU-Z. I didn’t have to make any adjustments to CPU load-line calibration or anything else. All the settings were left on automatic.
Memory overclocking is rather easy as well. I simply enabled XMP and verified the memory voltage was correct at 1.35v. I was able to take the G.Skill DDR4 3600MHz modules to 3733MHz with ease. The B550 Aorus Master never gave me headaches, lockups or problems when overclocked. It was as easy to work with as any motherboard I’ve ever worked with. In fairness, I’ve had this CPU on the bench a very long time and as a result, I can skip a lot of tweaking and dial in the settings I know the CPU needs. However, some motherboards do add difficulty in that I have to make some additional settings changes to achieve stability. That wasn’t the case here.
The VRM implementation is not only among the best I’ve ever seen, but its also one of the coolest running that I have ever seen. Even when running the system hard in an overclocked configuration, I’ve never seen the VRM break 51c. This is due to a very good heat sink design but also due to the fact that the VRM is a very efficient one. With 70A power stages, the VRM’s don’t have to be run hard to handle a 12 or 16 core CPU. As a result, the VRM stays cool as only a fraction of what its capable of is being asked for. Your CPU would be burnt to a crisp before the VRM on this thing would ever reach its limits.