Power Consumption and Temperatures

MSI has four major components for cooling the motherboard PCH and VRM. A big chunk of metal for the dual chipset, which is not connected to the VRM heatsink (As seen with ASRock X670E Taichi). A backplate strengthens the motherboard and provides passive cooling. Directly behind the VRM is an L bracket that has thermal pads. The power stages have a large heatsink with an elongated fin-stack for maximum heat dissipation. The only downside of this heatsink design, is that this generally requires more directed airflow for best results. As we get into the thermal testing, we'll see this is not a problem just because the processors do not require a large amount of current capacity. Nonetheless, depending on the case configuration, there is often a fan very close to the VRM.




For the MSI MEG X670E ACE 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. For the first 5-8 minutes, a fan is placed on the VRM heatsinks to simulate case airflow. If the heatsink has a internal fan, 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 excellent heat dissipation when a fan is placed on top of the heatsink. After the fan is removed around the 5 minute mark, VRM temps steadily increased until the end of the 30 minute test, nearing 70 °C. Well within the acceptable limits and shows that this motherboard can handle current or future AM5 CPUs. Once again any airflow near the VRM heatsink will drastically drop the temperatures due to the design.


The second test was to see how the VRM heatsink may fare in games. Temperatures rose 15°C where it plateaued after 20 minutes. Temperatures with or without a fan is perfectly fine due to the large heatsink. Any sort of airflow inside a case will lower these results by quite a bit.