Power Consumption and Temperatures

The ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi was two independent heatsinks for the 16+2+1 Phase VRM. The B650E chipset heatsink is separated, along with the M.2 heatsinks as well. These main VRM heatsinks seem a bit small, but as we get into the thermal tests breakdown, we'll see this is not a real problem, because the AMD Ryzen processors do not require a large amount of current capacity.




For the ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi thermal testing, one probe is placed along each bank of power stages. A probe is left out to log the ambient temperature. For temperature measurement, a Reed SD-947 4 channel Data Logging Thermometer is used, paired with four Omega Engineering SA1 self adhesive thermal couple probes. All temperatures are presented as Delta-T, which is the recorded temperature minus the ambient temperature as a base. The end result accounts for variation in ambient temperature, including changes over the course of a test.

Tests are conducted over a 30 minute period. For testing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is used in a stock configuration. Two tests are conducted per chart. One without a fan placed on the VRM heatsinks, which simulates case airflow and another with. if the heatsink has a internal fan as well, it is not disabled for these tests.


Since the Ryzen 7950X is thermally limited, overclocking was unnecessary here to show how well the VRM heatsink can handle a full load for an extended period of time. The graph shows good heat dissipation when a fan is placed on top of the heatsink for the entire test duration. Without the fan, as expected, VRM temps steadily increased until the end of the 30 minute test, with a 12 °C gap between the two heatsinks. 80 °C is still within acceptable limits and shows that this motherboard can handle current or future AM5 CPUs in a stock configuration. Airflow near the VRM heatsinks will lower the temperatures.


The second test was to see how the VRM heatsink may fare in games. Temperatures rose to mid 40°C after 10 minutes where it bounced around based on the game current load. Gaming temperatures with or without a fan is perfectly fine and shouldn't not be a concern.