BIOSTAR RACING B550GTA Ver 5.0 Motherboard Review

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Overclocking

Default Clocks

racing cpu-z

Again we see, the default clock on the Ryzen 7 3700X is 3500MHz. It seemed to down clock from the normal default of 3600. A lot of the Ryzen 3xxx chips run at this base clock. Now let’s see what we can get this chip up to on this motherboard.

racing cinebench stock

As we can see from the above Cinebench R23 picture, at the stock clock of 3.6 GHz we were able to score 13018. It boosted up to 4.242 GHz on all of the cores. Not too bad for being at the stock clock.

Next, we decided to manually overclock this chip and voltage. We figured we would start by trying an achievable 4.4 GHz. Unfortunately, it would not boot at this clock speed. We tossed 1.45 volts at the CPU and it still wouldn’t boot.

What I was able to achieve with this board, was 4.3GHz. I tried 4.35 and no matter what I tried, it would not boot and/or be stable at anything more than 4300 even.

racing cinebench 4.3

At the best we could do, 4.3GHz, we received a Cinebench score of 13,357 which was close to 400 points below the recently reviewed MSI B550 GAMING EDGE WIFI.

Was the lack of a better overclock due to the phases or cooling on the MOSFETS? Without BIOSTAR “bragging” about their cooling, one can only guess.

Keeping VRM’s Cool

Keeping VRMs cool in any enthusiast’s motherboard is an important aspect of how well an overclock will hold up and how well the system will run. The BIOSTAR RACING B550GTA Ver 5.0 seems to have an adequate cooler over the VRM’s, however, not knowing what type of heatsink or what thermal pads they used, only leaves all of us to guess how adequate the cooling really is. With an overclock of 4.3GHz when we have seen over 4.4 on the other two boards I’ve reviewed, leaves a big question in my mind. At the current price point of $159.99 I would think that they would have boasted about the VRM cooling and the overclocking capacity of a board with a “RACING” brand.  

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