ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING WI-FI Motherboard Review

The FPS Review may receive a commission if you purchase something after clicking a link in this article.

Overclocking

Default Clocks

Asus Rog Strix B550-F 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.

Asus Rog Strix B550-F cinebench

As we can see from the above Cinebench R23 picture, at the stock clock of 3.6 GHz we were able to score 12511. It boosted up to 4.122 GHz on all of the cores. Not too bad for being at the stock clock.

Next, I decided to manually overclock this chip and voltage. We figured we would start by trying an achievable 4.3 GHz. This board booted right up at the default voltage at 4.3 GHz.

Asus Rog Strix B550-F cinebench 4.3

Well, I got a nice jump up to a Cinebench R23 score of 13,046 with the bump up to 4.3GHz overclock. The chip ran stable and never jumped above 65c during the test. Unlike the previous review of the other B550 boards, we did not have to bump up the stock voltages.

I then decided to give a 4.4 GHz bump a try. This had mixed issues. First I had to bump the voltage up. Without the voltage increase, it would crash the system as soon as Cinebench started. I ended up bumping the voltage up to a 1.35 core voltage.

Asus Rog Strix B550-F cinebench 4.4

Yeppers, I hit the 4.4 GHz without any stability issues at a core voltage of 1.35. I didn’t see the CPU temps go up above 72c during this test. Which seemed to be an acceptable temp range.

Next, I decided to see what the system would do at 4425 MHz and keeping the core voltage at 1.35. Nope, wouldn’t run Cinebench. Again it crashed the system as soon as I started the benchmark. I then jumped into the BIOS and upped the voltage to 1.39 core voltage. Again, it crashed as soon as I started the benchmark. I then bumped the voltage up to 1.43 and the same thing happened.

All in all, I was not able to go above 4.4 GHz with the overclock on this board. Due to what reason, I’m not exactly sure. CPU, chipset, and motherboard temps all seemed fine. Maybe cooling on the VRMs? Who’s to say?

Keeping the VRMs 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 ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING (WI-FI) has large heatsinks installed to ensure the health of the VRMs. This added cooling on the motherboard should allow for many hours of gaming and any other possible tasks that one may need an enthusiast-level motherboard for.

However, and you can take this with a grain of salt, as mentioned above, I was not able to achieve an overclock above 4.4 GHz, unlike the MSI motherboard that achieved a 4450 MHz overclock. Not a huge difference, but nonetheless, we know this specific AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is able to overclock above the 4.4 GHz that we achieved.

Asus Rog Strix B550-F cinebench 4.4

As we see from the above-overclocked setting, the minimum never dropped lower than our 4.4GHz setting. Running Cinebench is a very demanding benchmark on the CPU thus this indicates that our VRMs are staying cool and not chocking the CPU so you don’t have to worry about the CPU throttling down during gameplay or any application that is CPU demanding.

We tested this motherboard on an open bench with no real airflow across the VRMs and an ambient temperature of 21 Celsius. Given this information, we feel ASUS did an excellent job of protecting and keeping the VRMs cool for a worry-free computing experience.

Recent News